The grammar of painting and engraving;

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THE GRAMMAR

PAINTING AND ENGRAVING.

/

YELLOW.

ORANGE.

Xasturtium.

RED.

Saffron

Sulphur.

GREEN.

Garnet

Turquoise.

BLUE.

Campanula.

VIOLET.

THE GRAMMAR

PAINTING AND ENGRAVING

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF

BLANC S GRAMMAIRE DES ARTS DU DESSIN

KATE NEWELL DOGGETT

WITH THE ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS

THIRD EDITION.

CHICAGO

S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY
1891.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873,

BY KATE N. DOGGETT,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

[ KNI3HT £c LSSHARXI

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION • . xiii

To THE READER xv

PAINTING.

I.

Painting is the art of expressing all the conceptions of the soul, by
means of all the realities of nature, represented upon a smooth
surface by their forms and colors .... I

II.

Without aiming either at utility or morality, painting is capable of
elevating the soul of nations by the dignity of its representations,
and of reforming the manners of men by its visible lessons . 7

III.

Painting has limits that literal imitation may restrict, that fiction
widens, but the mind alone can aggrandize 12

IV.

Although painting is the expressive art, par excellence, it is not
limited in character, it can unite expression to beauty in idealiz-
ing its figures by style, by manifesting typical truth in living in-
dividualities . . 1 3

V.

Painting can elevate itself to the sublime, but by the invention
of the painter rather than by the appliances peculiar to his art . 22

VI.

The methods peculiar to painting force themselves upon the artist
as soon as he invents his subject and conceives the first image
of it . . . - as

VI TABLE OF CONTENTS.

VII.

The first means the painter uses to express his thought is arrange-
ment 33

VIII.

Although the painter who composes his picture ought certainly to
be acquainted with the laws of perspective and submit to them,
the observance of these laws allows sufficient play of senti-
ment 48

IX.

Coloring his sketch or limiting himself to outline in his composi-
tion, the painter attains expression only in defining it by the
drawing, the attitude, the gesture, or the movement of each fig-
ure 68

X.

When the composition is once decided upon, when the gestures
and the movements are foreseen, the painter refers to the model
to give verisimilitude to his ideal, and naturalness to the forms
that must express it 97

XI.

After having verified the forms he has chosen, the artist finishes
by light and color the moral expression and the optical beauty of
his thought 121

XII.

Chiaro 'scuro, whose object is not only to put forms in relief, but
to convey the sentiment the painter wishes to express, is subject
to the requirements of moral beauty as well as to the laws of
natural truth 126

XIII.

Color being that which especially distinguishes painting from the
other arts, it is indispensable to the painter to know its laws,

so far as these are essential and absolute 145

Law of complementary colors . . . . . . . 150

White and black 158

The optical mixture . . . 161

The vibration of colors . . . . . . . > 164

Color of the light . 165

TABLE OF CONTENTS. Vll

XIV.

The character of touch, that is the quality of the material execu-
tion, is the painter's last means of expression . . . .170

XV.

Certain conventionalities of painting vary and must vary according
to the character of the work and the nature of the surface the

artist has to cover . . . 179

Fresco painting 180

Wax painting 182

Painting in distemper 183

Ceilings and cupolas 184

Oil painting 187

Pastel painting 190

Enamel painting . . 191

Guaches and aquarelles . . 194

Miniature 196

Painting upon glass 199

Encaustic painting . 199

XVI.

Although the domain of the painter is co-extensive with Nature,
there exists in his art a hierarchy founded upon the significance,
relative or absolute, local or universal, of his works . . . 201

XVII.

The different kinds of painting belong to the lower or higher
method, according as imitation or style plays in them the princi-
pal r61e . 207

Landscape 209

Animals 218

Battles and hunting scenes 225

Portrait 229

ENGRAVING.

I.

Engraving is the art of tracing in intaglio upon metal, or in relief
upon wood, a drawing from which impressions can be taken . 239

viu TABLE OF CONTENTS.

II.

The art of the engraver is bound by certain general laws, although
there exist particular conventionalities for each of the different
kinds of engraving . . 245

III.
ENGRAVING ON COPPER.

However important in the copper plate the choice and the treatment
of the work may be, the engraver should strive above everything,
by correct and expressive drawing, to render the characteristics
of the model he wishes to engrave 247

IV.

AQUAFORTIS ENGRAVING.

Engraving with aquafortis, when it is not a preparation for copper,
ought generally to be executed without apparent regularity, with
free strokes rarely crossed, which, never covering the whole
plate, leave a role for the whiteness of the paper . . . 268

V.

.MEZZOTINT, AQUATINT.

Mezzotints lacking firmness, the engraver must correct their soft-
ness, and unless a vaporous effect is to be given, must bring out

the lights with a firm, resolute hand 279

Aquatint 283

Imitation of pencilling ... .... 284

VI.

WOOD ENGRAVING.

Engraving upon wood, incapable of producing the delicate shad-
ings of copper plate, suits serious works, which by the terseness
of their expression, lend grandeur even to works of small size . 286

TABLE OF CONTENTS. ix

VII.

ENGRAVING IN CAMEO.
Engraving in Cameo. Engraving in colors 302

LITHOGRAPHY.

Allied to engraving is Lithography ; the art of tracing upon stone
a drawing from which impressions can be printed . . 309

CONCLUSION 313

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

CHROMATIC ROSE ... Frontispiece.

PAGE

FIGURE D'EXPRESSION Michael Angela. ... 20

VOLTAIRE'S STAIRCASE Paul Chenavard 27

EXAMPLE OF SYMMETRICAL COMPOSITION.

ENTHRONED VIRGIN Giovanni Bellini 35

A BALANCED COMPOSITION.

THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS Raphael 41

EXAMPLE OF PERSPECTIVE 50

EXAMPLE OF PHYSICAL PERSPECTIVE 56

EXAMPLE OF FORESHORTENING 67

SKETCH FOR AN ENTOMBMENT Raphael 71

ATTITUDE OF PROPHET ISAIAH Michael Angela. ... 77

ATTITUDE OF AHAZ Michael Angela. ... 78

GESTURES FROM " THE LAST SUPPER ". . .Leonardo da Vinci 81

THE SACRIFICE OF ABRAHAM Rembrandt 87

ELYMAS STRUCK WITH BLINDNESS Raphael. ... 89

MOVABLE FIGURES IN PIECES 95

STUDY FOR THE " APOLLO OF PARNASSUS " Raphael. . . . 108

STUDY FOR THE "VIRGIN" OF FRANCIS THE FIRST. Raphael. ...115

THE VIRGIN OF FRANCIS THE FIRST Raphael 1 16

ST. MICHAEL Filippino Lippi. . . . 1 18

THE SUPPER AT EMMAUS Rembrandt ... 142

DIAGRAM OF COLORS 154

DIAGRAMS SHOWING COMPLEMENTARY COLORS 163

NEPTUNE Giulio Romano .... 185

THE HUT OF THE BIG TREE Rembrandt. . . .211

MERCURY AND ARGUS Claude Lorraine 215

LION Barye. . . .219

Cow Paul Potter 223

xn LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAG*

PORTRAIT OF BERTIN Ingres 233

PORTRAIT OF SIR THOMAS MORE Holbein 235

VIGNETTE 239

ITALIAN NIELLO 242

VIGNETTE 247

TRITON Mantegna 250

ST. GEORGE Martin Schoen 251

THE NATIVITY Albert Diirer 253

CLEOPATRA Marc-Anthony 257

FRYING FISH Rembrandt 271

A PEASANT PAYING HIS SCOT Ostade. . . . 274

COMBAT FROM THE u DANCE OF DEATH " Holbein 286

FROM THE LIFE OF THE VIRGIN Albert Diirer 289

ERASMUS Holbein 293

SUBJECTS FROM THE " DANCE OF DEATH " Holbein. . . .297

VIGNETTE 321

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

THE same motives that induced Charles Blanc to
write his " Grammar of Painting and Engraving "
led to its translation, — the wish to place in the
hands of those who are groping for reasons for the
love they feel for the beautiful, a book that should
teach them the principles that underlie all works of
art ; a book not voluminous enough to alarm, plain
and lucid enough to instruct, sufficiently elevated in
style to entertain.

" For what delights can equal those

That stir the spirit's inner deeps,
When one who loves but knows not, reaps
A truth from one who loves and knows."

That Charles Blanc knows of what he writes, no
one will doubt who follows his eloquent pages in the
original. The translator hopes that faithful study and
an honest endeavor to preserve the " inexorable clear-
ness " of the French idiom, will not so far have failed
as to make him unwelcome in an English dress.

The complaint of M. Blanc that the art-education
of the young is so utterly neglected that later in life
they are incapable of judging the works of sculptor
or painter, is true here in a sense that cannot be
true in France, where, at least in the large towns, the

Xiv TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

constant presence of the best creations of Grecian
and Roman genius, either originals or well-executed
copies, are helps to an education that is wholly want-
ing to us.

There is the greater need that we should learn
from books how to judge of works of art, that we
may intelligently enjoy them in other lands, and in-
telligently choose from among them statues, pictures,
prints, for the adorning of our houses, the pleasure
of our friends, or the higher purpose of placing in
galleries for the instruction and elevation of those
who cannot journey far for mental and spiritual food.

Histories of art, in all its varied forms of develop-
ment, histories of all the schools that have sprung
up in ancient and modern times, are numerous, as
are treatises upon the different branches of the plas-
tic arts, but what we especially need is the ABC
of Art, and that, it is believed, we must learn, not
from its history or its philosophy, but from its gram
mar.

And so for this little book we would ask, as the
author does for the original, the reader's patient and
good-natured attention.

TO THE READER.

THIS book aims to instruct. It was written for
those who have finished their scholastic studies, and
who, at the moment of entering upon active life, de-
sire to know its peaceful and poetic side. They are
ignorant of the Art of that antiquity whose language
they have learned, with whose heroic actions and
thoughts they are familiar. But it is in the creations
of the artist that the pure essence of the ancient
philosophy is deposited ; in them it assumed a tangi-
ble form ; in them breathe the gods of Virgil and of
Homer, rendered visible by metamorphoses more as-
tonishing and more charming than those of Ovid.

The art-education of the young is completely null.
The proud and brilliant laureate finishes his classical
studies without getting the least tincture of it. He
knows the history of the ancient Greeks, their cap-
tains, their orators, and their philosophers; has read
of their intestine quarrels and their grand Persian
wars, but he knows neither their sublime ideas upon
painting and statuary, nor their adorable marble
gods and their divine temples.

That public instruction is mute upon questions of
Art is, doubtless, because of the predominance of

xvi TO THE READER.

certain ill understood ideas. Many chaste divinities
whose presence elevates and purifies the soul, are re-
garded as images enveloping the spirit of evil, and
full of dangerous seductions. Hence the aversion
of clerical institutions to the pagan arts, a sentiment
that in our laic colleges is translated by silence.

France, formerly renowned for the excellence of
her judgment and the delicacy of her taste, and who
has at this moment in her capital the most skilful
artists in the world, is, in all that concerns a knowl-
edge of Art, one of the most backward nations in
Europe. In England, the books that treat of art and
the beautiful, are known to every well-educated per-
son. Ladies, old and young, have read, either in the
originals or in the innumerable reviews that treat of
them, the writings of Burke, Hume, Reid, Price, Ali-
son, the ingenious " Analyses " of Hogarth, and the
grave " Discourses ".of Reynolds. In Germany, the
most abstract ideas of Art are familiar to an im-
mense number of students. This science of the
beautiful, or rather this philosophy of the sentiment
that Baumgarten called the aesthetic, is taught in all
the German universities. The lofty speculations of
Kant upon the sublime, the strophes of Schiller
upon the ideal, the spirited sketches and the humor-
ous paradoxes of Jean Paul, the ideas of Mendel-
ssohn, the polemic between Lessing and Winckel-
mann, the profound discourses of Schelling, the
grand lessons of Hegel, all are understood and dis-
cussed by innumerable adepts. At Geneva also,

TO THE READER. xvil

where there are teachers of aesthetics, the " Reflec-
tions " of Toppfer and the " Studies " of Pictet are
much better known than the eloquent and luminous
pages of Lamennais and Cousin are in France.

Here, on the contrary, where Art is living, enters
everywhere, attracts and interests everybody, the
ability to judge the works of the sculptor or painter
seems completely foreign to our public. Official
salons and private expositions are crowded with
people without ideas, without information, and who,
for want of rudimentary instruction, fall headlong
into a sea of errors. Every day in the midst of this
Paris that believes herself a new Athens, we see per-
sons of distinction, naturalized Luculluses, million-
aires, and wits, rush to the Hotel Drouot, as if to
give a public spectacle of the most monstrous here-
sies; to-day indulging a caprice that a thousand
boobies will imitate to-morrow, running up to scan-
dalous amounts the price of screens, chiffons, or
dolls by a seventh-rate painter, when the great mas-
ters, the august sovereigns of Art, are shamefully
cheapened, and finally go out of the country unable
to sustain competition with a pretty nothing of Wat-
teau. Thus the France of the nineteenth century
presents the incredible anomaly of an intellectual
nation professing to adore Art, but knowing not its
principles, its language, its history, its veritable dig-
nity, its true grace.

This comes from the education we receive at col-
lege. Most young people at the beginning of their

xvi 11 TO THE READER.

career, attracted in manifold directions, neglect a
study whose first elements have not been taught
them. Some who might have had leisure for it hold
aloof, from distrust of themselves, for want of proper
initiation. The logic of things ought to, fill this gap
in public instruction. We must either proscribe an-
tiquity altogether or remove the veil that covers the
most beautiful works of her genius, works that are
at the same time the noblest and most elevating.
Such a reform would be more profitable to France
than many battles, many conquests. We shall not
be at the head of the nations till we shall have an-
nexed to the domains of our intelligence the beauti-
ful province in which flourish the gardens of the
ideal.

Here let me tell how the idea of the present book
was suggested. At dinner one day with the digni-
taries of one of the largest cities of France, conver-
sation turned upon the Arts. All the guests spoke
of them and well, but each intrenched himself be-
hind his own personal views by virtue of the adage :
" On ne peut disputer des gouts." In vain I pro-
tested against this false principle, saying that, even at
table, it was inadmissible, and that a distinguished
magistrate, the classic par excellence of gastronomy —
Brillat Savarin, — would have been shocked at such
blasphemy. The authority of even his great name
was not respected, and the guests separated gayly, af-
ter uttering heresies to make one shiver. But among
the eminent men of the company, there was one

TO THE READER. Xix

who, somewhat mortified that he had not the most
elementary notions of art, asked if there were not
some book in which those notions were presented in
a form simple, clear, and brief. I replied that no
such book existed, that upon leaving college I should
have been only too happy to find such an one ; that
many works had been written upon the beautiful,
treatises without number upon architecture and
painting, and volumes upon sculpture, but a work
covering the whole subject, a lucid resume of all ac-
cepted ideas touching the arts of design, was yet to
be conceived.

Thus was suggested the thought of this book.
Embraced at first with enthusiasm, then - abandoned,
resumed again with new courage, this thought has
long germinated in my mind. The difficulties to be
encountered were great, for not only must one ren-
der a severe account of one's impressions and senti-
ments, but he must express himself upon subjects
rebellious to all analysis, in a language whose clear-
ness is inexorable. It is possible to treat aesthetics
under the serviceable veil of the German language,
for a people whom the twilight enchants and which
is endowed with the faculty of seeing clearly in the
dark, but in France, in the midst of a nation of the
Latin race, whose indigenous good sense is a perpet-
ual irony against dreamers, how was one to speak of
the subjective and the non ego, of the sublime dynam-
ics, and of all those things which, already sufficiently
obscure, demand at least intelligible expressions, a

XX TO THE READER.

clear form despoiled of all pedantry, exempt from all
triviality. What would Voltaire think, what would
he say, could he open certain books upon aesthetics
published since his day ; if, for instance, he should
read in Burke that " the effect of the sublime is to
deobstruct the vessels, and that of the beautiful to
relax the fibres of the body." Imagine what treas-
ures of wit and good humor he would have added
to his immortal pleasantry.

To be clear, was the most difficult, as it was the
most imperative duty. The time has passed in which
writers can shut themselves up in a sort of Free-
masonry, interdicted to the vulgar. Nowadays one
must write and speak for the multitude, and if there
be a study that should be made easy, is it not the
study of beauty and grace ?

If I have not shrunk before the difficulties of the
task, it was because I was sustained by the love of
beautiful things, and the pleasure of making them
known, trusting to the good nature of the reader and
hoping for his interested attention. The sculptor
Puget was accustomed to say, " The marble trem-
bles before me." Animated by a very different sen-
timent, the author of this book would say, I trem-
ble before the marble.

THE GRAMMAR

OF

PAINTING AND ENGRAVING.

i.

PAINTING is THE ART OF EXPRESSING ALL THE

CONCEPTIONS OF THE SOUL, BY MEANS OF ALL THE
REALITIES OF NATURE ; REPRESENTED UPON A SMOOTH
SURFACE BY THEIR FORMS AND COLORS.

THE offspring of a common cradle, Architecture,
two arts issued one after the other from the maternal
bosom, Sculpture and Painting. The latter in the
beginning was nothing more than a coloration of the
surfaces of the temple and its reliefs, a coloration
symbolic rather than imitative. Later it detached
itself from the walls ; it became an independent art,
living its own life, mobile and free. But even when
completely emancipated it played only a secondary
role. The art, par excellence, of mythological an-
tiquity was not, could not be, painting ; this we learn
by induction, although time has spared us no ancient
paintings except those of Pompeii which, in genius
and culture, was a Grecian city. Under the empire

2 PAINTING.

of mythology which referred all creation to man
and recognized in the gods only perfect men, ren
dered immortal by beauty, the favorite, the dominant
art, must have been sculpture. Those beautiful re-
alities, the rivers, the mountains, the trees and the
flowers, the infinite heaven, the immense sea, were
represented only by human forms. The Earth was
a woman crowned with towers ; the Ocean and its
depths were figured by a boisterous god, followed by
tritons and nereids ; its roaring was only the sound
of marine shells blown by half-human monsters.
The bark of the oak concealed the modest Ham-
adryad, the green prairie was a couchant nymph, and
Spring herself bore the name and tunic of a young
girl. How could painting display its brilliancy and
eloquence when Nature, which contains in itself the
treasury of light, and in this treasury all the colors
of the palette, was wanting to its representations ?

What has happened ? By what evolution has
painting taken the first place ? It is Christianity
which has supplanted sculpture, by placing beauty
of soul above that of the body. When a religion
full of terror and impregnated with a melancholy
poetry succeeded to the serenity of Paganism, the
artist found above him only an invisible God ; before
him troubled and mortal beings. Dethroned from
his pedestal, man falls into the midst of the acci
dents, trials, and griefs of life. He is plunged again
into the bosom of nature. He wears the costume
of the times in which he lives, and, subject to the

PAINTING. 3

influences of the sky under which he is born, and the
landscape that surrounds him, he receives their im-
pressions, reflects their colors. The artist will neces-
sarily represent the human figure by its peculiar,
even accidental characteristics, for this painting will
be the most fitting art, because it furnishes to ex-
pression immense resources, air, space, perspective,
landscape, light and shadow, color.

In the domain of Pagan sculpture man was naked,
tranquil, and beautiful. In the realm of Christian
painting he will be troubled, modest, and clothed.
Nakedness now makes him blush, the flesh is a
shame to him, and beauty causes fear. Henceforth
he will seek his pleasures in the moral world, he
will need an expressive art, an art which to touch or
charm him borrows all the images of creation. This
art is painting. Aiming to express internal senti-
ments, painting has not, like sculpture, need of the
three dimensions. Faithful to its primitive purpose,
which was to decorate walls, it uses only smooth sur-
faces, plane, concave, or convex ; for appearance suf-
fices and must suffice. Why ? Because if it were
palpable it would become sculpture. The cubic
reality would take from the image its essentially
spiritual character and shackle the flight of the soul.
Framed in real things, its expression would lack
unity, would be contradicted by the changing spec-
tacle of nature, by the ceaselessly varying light of
the sun, and its factitious colors would grow pale,
would fade out before those of the colorist, par ex-

4 PAINTIVG.

celfence. The statue, elevated sometimes upon a
pedestal, sometimes upon the capital of a column, or
isolated in its niche, which forms a foundation, an
abiding place for it, has an independent and separate
existence, is a world in itself. Monochrome, it forms
a contrast with all the natural colorations which, far
from injuring its unity, enhance it, render it more
striking. The painter, on the contrary, having to
represent not so much situations, like sculpture, but
actions, and all the infinitely varied scenes that pass
upon the stage of life, must choose suitable natural
objects to surround his figures, must find means to
characterize the landscape and to complete the ex-
pression of it, that is to say, the light and the color.

Color is in painting an essential, almost indispen-
sable element, since having all Nature to represent,
the painter cannot make her speak without borrow-
ing her language. But here a profound distinction
presents itself.

Intelligent beings have a language represented by
articulate sounds ; organized beings, like animals and
vegetables, express themselves by cries or forms, con-
tour, carriage. Inorganic nature has only the lan-
guage of color. It is by color alone that a certain
stone tells us it is a sapphire or an emerald. If the
painter can by means of some features give us a
clear idea of animals and vegetables, make us recog-
nize at once a lion, a horse, a poplar, a rose, it is
absolutely impossible, without the aid of color, to
show us an emerald or a sapphire. Color, then, is

PAINTING. 5

the peculiar characteristic of the lower forms of
nature, while the drawing becomes the medium of ex-
pression, more and more dominant, the higher we
rise in the scale of being. Therefore painting can
sometimes dispense with color, if, for example, the
inorganic nature and the landscape are insignificant
or useless in the scene represented.

Thus we find verified, one by one, all the members
of our definition, the one being only the corollary of
the other.

Painting, so often and for so long a time defined
" the imitation of nature," had been misunderstood
in its essence, and reduced to the role filled by the
colored photograph. The end has been confounded
with the means. Such a definition could not be
maintained after the birth of that science of senti-
ment which we call aesthetics, after the day in which
it became almost an art. There is now not a single
critic, not a single artist, who does not see in nature,
not simply a model to imitate, but a theme for the
interpretations of his mind. One considers it as a
repertoire of pleasing or terrible objects, of graceful
or imposing forms which will serve him to commu
nicate his emotions, his thoughts. Another com-
pares nature to a piano, upon which each painter
plays in turn the music that pleases him. But
nobody would define painting as imitation, and con-
found thus the means with the end, the dictionary
with eloquence.

If painting were simple imitation, its first duty

6 PAINTING.

would be to paint objects in their true dimensions.
Colossal figures as well as miniatures would be
forbidden, for both are symbols rather than imita-
tions, commemorative rather than imitative images.
It would condemn the prophets of Michael Angelo
as well as the little figures of Terburg and the
diminutive pastures of Paul Potter, in which the
cattle are no larger than the hand. Dwarfed or en-
larged to this point such figures address themselves
only to the imagination, forming no part of the real
world. The mind alone renders them life-like. If
it is true, for instance, that a man or an animal may
appear as small as the hand when one perceives
them at a great distance, it is also true that the eye
sees them indistinctly, but the smaller the objects,
the more exactly must they be painted, since they
can only be seen near at hand, so that, while nature
indicates distance by vagueness of form, the artist
neutralizes distance by precision of form. One
readily accepts these agreeable fictions, persuaded
that painting is not the pleonasm of reality, but the
expression of souls by the imitation of things. Thus
it is no longer art which revolves around nature, but
nature that revolves around art as the earth around
the sun.

II.

N

WITHOUT AIMING EITHER AT UTILITY OR MORALITY,
PAINTING IS CAPABLE OF ELEVATING THE SOUL OF
NATIONS BY THE DIGNITY OF ITS REPRESENTATIONS,
AND OF REFORMING THE MANNERS OF MEN BY ITS
VISIBLE LESSONS.

A GREEK painter having represented, in one of his
pictures, Palamedes put to death by his friends upon
the perfidious denunciation of Ulysses, it is related
of Alexander the Great, that every time he cast his
eyes upon the picture, he trembled and turned pale,
because it reminded him that he had caused the
death of his friend Clitus. This story, which repeats
itself every day in life in a thousand ways, makes
comprehensible the force of the lessons that painting
may contain. Without being either a missionary of
religion, a teacher of ethics, or a means of govern
ment, painting improves our morals, because it
touches us and can awake in us noble aspirations
or salutary remorse. Its figures, in their eternal
silence, speak more loudly and emphatically to us
than could the living philosopher or moralist — men
like ourselves. Their immobility sets our mind in
motion. More persuasive than the painter who has
created them, they lose the character of a human

8 PAINTING.

work because they seem to live a loftier life and to
belong to another, to an ideal world. The morality
that painting teaches us is so much the more capti-
vating because instead of being imposed upon us by
the artist it is accepted by ourselves. The spectator
respects and admires it, regarding it as his own
work. Believing he has discovered it, he willingly
submits to it, thinking to obey only his own thought.

Thus painting purifies people by its mute elo-
quence. Moreover, whatever may be the nature of
its images, they always benefit the mind, at first
because they address themselves to the mind and
excite it, afterwards because in representing to us
heroic actions or familiar things, they offer us a
choice in life. " In sculpture," says Joubert, " the
expression is all on the surface ; in painting it ought
to be within ; in this, beauty is in intaglio ; in relief
in that." The philosopher writes his thought for
those who can think as he does and who know how
to read. The painter shows his thought to all who
have eyes to see. That hidden and naked virgin
— Truth — the artist finds without seeking. He puts
a veil upon her, encourages her to please, proves to
her that she is beautiful, and when he has repro-
duced her image he makes us take her and he takes
her himself for Beauty.

In communicating to us what has been felt by
others, and what perhaps we should never have felt
ourselves, the painter gives new strength and com-
pass to the soul. Who knows of how many impres-

PAINTING. 9

sions, fugitive in appearance, the morality of a man
is composed, and upon what depend the gentleness
of his manners, the correctness of his habits, the
elevation of his thoughts ? If the painter represents
acts of cruelty or injustice, he inspires us with horror
A certain scene in the Inquisition, in which Granet
saw only the sombre effect of a dim light, will teach
us toleration. A historical episode will tell us better
than a book can do what we should admire, what
hate. A painting in which one sees young negroes
garroted, insulted, whipped, crowded into the hold
of vessels, will bring about the abolition of slavery
as surely and as quickly as the severest formulas of
the law. " The Unhappy Family " of Prud'hon would
move all the fibres of charity better than the hom-
ilies of the preacher. In a picture, nay, in a simple
lithograph without color, Charlet has expressed by
the physiognomy and gestures of a child, better still
than by the legend written below the print, this sen-
timent of childish but exquisite delicacy : " Those to
whom we give, we must not waken." A Greuze, a
Chardin, without pedantry, counsel peace and hon-
esty. Again, let a Dutch painter, a Slingelandt, a
Metsu, represent to us, in a picture without figures,
the preparations for a modest breakfast which awaits
the master and mistress of the house, or only a cage
of birds at a window, a bouquet of flowers in a vase
this simple subject has in painting not only a savor
that the reality itself would not possess, but an un-
expected signification, a moral value. Your thought

10 PAINTING.

is carried at once towards the delights of the house-
hold, of family life. This little spectacle, individual
though it be, answers to a general- idea, and if it is
presented by an artist who has been secretly moved
or charmed by it, he will bring a whole world before
the eyes of the imagination. You will feel the grace
of private life, the ndivet& and tenderness of the
domestic hearth, the interchange of affectionate epi-
thets, all that the ancients understood by that touch-
ing and profound word, house, domus.

Retired within a dwelling that has ever some door
open towards the ideal, the true artist has generally
a morality quite superior to that of ordinary men.
We meet at the galleys, in the prisons, on the
benches of the assize court, individuals of all profes-
sions One never sees there an artist. " Doubtless
the artist is the son of his epoch," says Schiller, in
" Letters upon ^Esthetic Education," " but woe to
him if he be also the disciple, the favorite of it. Let
some beneficent divinity snatch the child early from
the bosom of its mother, feed him upon the milk of
a better age, and let him grow up and attain his ma-
jority under the far-off sky of Greece. Grown to
manhood, let him return, a foreigner, to the Present,
not to delight it by his appearance, but rather, terri-
ble as the son of Agamemnon, to purify it. It is
true he will receive his materials from the present,
but the form he will borrow from a nobler epoch, and
even, outside of time, from the absolute, immutable
unity of his own essence. Thence, issuing from the

PAINTING. 1 1

pure ether of his celestial nature, flows the source of
beauty, that the corruption of generations and ages
never disturbs. His material, fancy may dishonor
as it has ennobled, but the form, always chaste, es-
capes its caprices. For long the Roman of the first
century had bent the knee before his emperors, hut
the statues always stood upright, the temples re-
mained sacred in the eyes of those who jested at
the gods, and the noble style of the edifices that
sheltered a Nero or a Commodus protested against
their infamous practices. When the human race
loses its dignity, it is art which saves it. Truth con-
tinues to live in the illusion, and the copy will one
day serve to reestablish the model."

It is because painting is burdened with no official
instruction that she gently forms us anew, makes us
better. The law is less obeyed because it enforces
obedience, moral teachers less heeded because they
command. Art knows how to persuade, knowing
how to please.

III.

PAINTING HAS LIMITS THAT LITERAL IMITATION
MAY RESTRICT, THAT FICTION WIDENS, BUT THE MIND
ALONE CAN ELEVATE.

WHATEVER may be the extent of its domain, and it
is immense, painting has limits. These are not
marked by a trenchant line, they insensibly melt
into each other and are lost in the other arts whose
frontiers begin before its are reached. More exact
than music, painting defines sentiments and thoughts
by visible forms and colors, but it cannot, like music,
transport us into the ethereal regions, the impene-
trable worlds. Less ponderous than sculpture and
less the slave of the material used, it addresses itself
to the mind by simple semblances, conquers space
by means of a fiction, but not having the three di-
mensions of extension, cannot render beauty palpable
to us, make it live in the midst of us, under the sun
that enlightens us, and in the air that we breathe.
Painting holds the middle place between sculpture
that we can see and touch, and music that we can
neither see nor touch.

Limited to the presentation of a single action of
life, and in that action to a single moment, the
painter has, it is true, the liberty of choosing; but

PAINTING. 13

this liberty is not without limits, his choice is not
unrestricted. If the limits of motion are infinitely
broader for the painter than for the sculptor, he
must avoid exaggerated, convulsive movements, as
these offend the beholder in a representation that
is to be lasting. The same is true of movements
whose duration is offensive. It is unseemly to paint
the portrait of a man bursting with laughter. The
reason is apparent. Laughter is accidental, and if
admissible in a composition that suggests it, where
it does not fill the entire picture, it is repugnant to
us to see a play of the muscles so fleeting, forever
characterize a face, and immortalize itself upon the
canvas, to impose upon us forever its stereotyped
and unvarying grimace. On the contrary, in the
portrait of a sad woman or a melancholy poet, there
is nothing to displease, because sadness is less trans-
itory in life than the burst of laughter, and the one,
more in harmony with the permanent state of the
soul, leads us back to it gently and without effort,
while the other draws us from it abruptly and often
with violence. There is after all nothing sadder
than to have ever present the image of extravagant
gayety, imprinted on the portraits of those who have
ceased to live or who will soon be among our an-
cestors.

Thus painting does not always express all it is
capable of expressing, does not pass to the limits of
its domain. Doubtless, paroxysms of passion are
not forbidden to it, but it shows greater skill to

14 PAINTING.

suggest than to paint them. Diderot, the most im-
petuous and the boldest of critics, has shown that
painting becomes greater by imposing narrower
limits upon itself, and that, instead of representing
a tragic denouement, it is more fitting to announce it
by indicating in the present action the moment that
has preceded and that which is to follow. Suppose
the painter wishes to represent the sacrifice of Iphi-
genia, should he place before our eyes the gaping
and bloody wound which the knife of the priest has
just opened? No, horror would be changed to dis-
gust. But if he appeals to us at the moment the
tragedy is preparing, if he paints " the victimarius
who approaches with the wide basin that is to
receive the blood of Iphigenia," he will thrill us
with horror and delight, because the spectacle, as
yet not being horrible, the horror of it will be
imagined instead of seen. Each will conceive and
feel it according to the constitution of his own
mind.

A remarkable thing, which, however, I believe
has not been noticed, is that the domain of paint-
ing ends just where the illusion of the senses ought
to begin. It is certainly not unexampled that a
picture should deceive the eye, at least for a
moment. A Teniers, a Chardin, could paint a cake,
a loaf of bread, oysters on the shell, in a way to
excite the sensation of hunger. Velasquez has
proven in his famous picture of the " Wine Drink-
ers." and in that of the "Aguador," or water-carrier of

PAINTING. 1 5

Seville, that he could imitate a glass of water or
one of wine in a way to excite thirst, and, for a
moment, deceive the eye. Nevertheless, if the
painter's ambition rested there, if he sought such
triumphs of deception, he would soon pass the
limits of his art. Admit that, to increase the illu-
sion, he may add a factitious light to the light of
day, let him light up his picture artificially from
before or behind by means of certain transparencies,
the illusion would be heightened, and the imitation
having reached its utmost limit, would perhaps for
the moment produce a greater impression than
the reality itself. But we are no longer in the
field of painting. Optical and physical phenomena,
mingled with the resources of art, have made of
the picture a diorama.

But what happens ? This astonishing illusion
produces at last almost the effect of wax figures.
You see before you a real church, illuminated and
filled with people, but they are motionless, and the
church is silent as the desert. Or you are shown
a real landscape, a Swiss view, over which your
eye runs, which bristles with firs and rocks and is
washed by a lake full of freshness, but this land-
scape that passes through all the changes of light,
from dawn till sunset, contains only dead figures,
cattle that neither live nor move, and boats frozen
in a lake of lead. The greater the truth, the more
the falsehood betrays itself; the more deceitful the
painting, the less it deceives us. After a moment's

1 6 PAINTING.

contemplation we comprehend nothing of this church
in which priest and people seem to have been struck
with paralysis; this resplendent choir in which no
light shines, no shadow moves, we find unlifelike ;
impossible this Swiss landscape, in which, at all
hours of the day, the figures are changed to statues,
the animals glued to the ground. By a singular
return of truth, the illusion which deceived us is
precisely that which undeceives us. So true it is
that man is powerless to imitate inimitable nature,
and that in the art of the painter natural objects
are introduced not to represent themselves but to
represent a conception of the artist. So true is it,
finally, that the semblance is a means of expression
agreed upon rather than an absolutely imitative
proceeding, since the last step in imitation is pre-
cisely that in which it no longer signifies anything.
The role, then, that fiction plays in art is im-
portant ; but fortunately, fiction, instead of restricting
the limits of art, enlarges, extends them. As upon
the stage we have agreed to hear Cinna or Britan-
nicus express themselves in French, so we allow
the artist to paint upon his canvas a flying figurey
or draw upon a vase in imitation of the Greeks,
such or such figures incompatible with all illusion,
all verisimilitude, as, for example, fauns and bac-
chantes that walk on the air without support, whose
pure silhouettes, full of natural grace, move, flattened
on a monochrome background, without chiaro 'scuro
and without relief.

PAINTING. 1 7

Everybody knows the story, that has been re-
peated to weariness, of the Greek painter who
imitated a basket of grapes skillfully enough to
deceive the birds. There is in this fable an es-
sential and significant feature, a feature unnoticed,
and that Lessing has recalled in the " Laocoon."
The basket in the picture of Zeuxis was carried
by a young boy. But the painter might have
said : " I have spoiled my master-piece ; if I had
executed the child as well as the grapes, the birds
would not have come near the basket for fear of
the boy." It was only a vain scruple of modesty ;
one might have consoled Zeuxis by saying to him :
Your figure painted with all possible truth would
not have frightened the birds, because the eyes of
animals see only what they see; man, on the con-
trary, looking at a painting, fancies movement in
immobility, reality in appearance. What his eye
does rot see, he perceives in the depths of that
dark chamber we call imagination.

Man alone has the privilege of being seduced,
deceived by a secret connivance of his thought
with that of the painter. Admirable illusion,
which, without cheating the eye, gives change to
the mind. Marvelous falsehood, which, by the
complicity of our soul, moves us more forcibly than
truth, like those dreams which are sometimes more
sorrowful, sometimes more charming than life itself.

IV.

ALTHOUGH PAINTING is THE EXPRESSIVE ART, PAR

EXCELLENCE, IT IS NOT LIMITED IN CHARACTER, IT
CAN UNITE EXPRESSION TO BEAUTY IN IDEALIZING ITS
FIGURES BY STYLE, THAT IS TO SAY BY MANIFESTING
TYPICAL TRUTH IN LIVING INDIVIDUALITIES.

THERE exists between expression and beauty an
immense interval and even an apparent contra-
diction. The interval is that which separates
Christianity from antiquity. The contradiction con-
sists in this, that pure beauty — I speak here of
plastic beauty — does not readily harmonize with
instantaneous changes of countenance, with the
infinite variety of individual physiognomy, and with
the endless mobility of the same physiognomy un-
dergoing the innumerable impressions of life, and
passing from serenity to terror, from gayety to sad-
ness, from the grimaces of laughter to the con-
tortions of grief.

The stronger the expression, the more physical
beauty is sacrificed to moral beauty. That is why
pagan sculpture is so measured in its expression.
Instead of concentrating it upon the face which it
would have disfigured, the sculptor lets it per-
meate the whole figure ; he puts it in the gesture,

PAINTING. 19

which is the expression of the soul in movement,
or in the attitude which is its expression in re-
pose. The frightful cries uttered by Laocoon in
the grasp of the serpents, the antique sculptor has
reduced to sighs, that he might not disfigure the
features of his hero ; but the poet has reproduced
these cries, clamores horrendos, and the painter
can represent them, but he must restrain himself
within certain limits if he wishes to choose the
side of dignity and grandeur. He must idealize
his figure by style.

What do these words signify? For the painter
as for the sculptor, to give style to a figure, is to
impress a typical character upon that which would
only present an individual truth. Thus painting,
when it aims at style, has a tendency to draw near
to sculpture. But between the two arts there is a
sensible difference. An animated expression that
might be represented upon canvas would be shock-
ing in marble.

It is repugnant to the sculptor to express certain
vices which by their baseness would make the face
ugly ; but the painter can depict them. Yet, to
preserve the conditions of style, he must seek
generic accents. If, for example, he wishes to paint
a hypocrite, this hypocrite must have all the traits
of hypocrisy, must appear to us, not as a Tartuffe,
but as Tartuffe himself.

Vile instincts, gross sensuality, lechery, drunken-
ness, all that makes man like the brute, sculpture

2O

PAINTING.

dared not represent in the human face ; therefore
antique genius sought in the depths of the water
tritons and syrens, in the woods the goat-footed
satyr, the sylvan faun and the centaur. The great
artists of antiquity would not mar the beauty of

FIGURE D'EXPRESSION. BY MICHAEL ANGEI.O.

man by the signs of degrading passions, they con-
tented themselves with sculpturing human vices
in the precursors of humanity, in those beings not
yet enfranchised from original bestiality, that were
nevertheless respected, as savage ancestors, as the
imperfect and mysterious gods of primitive nature.

PAINTING. 2 1

But what sculpture refused to immortalize in
marble or bronze, what she would not render pal-
pable, the painter traces upon canvas, because
instead of presenting tangible bodies, the canvas
presents only impalpable images; instead of offer-
ing us the thickness of things she offers only the
mirage. Real, ugliness is forbidden to sculpture;
apparent, painting does not reject the ugly, be-
cause it has a thousand means of mitigating its
expression, of rendering it acceptable by the pres-
tige of light and the language of color, by accom-
panying circumstances, by the choice of accessories.
When Raphael introduced deformity into a work
of style, as in the famous cartoon, " The Cure of the
Lame Man " at the gate of the temple, he redeems
and elevates it by effacing the purely accidental
features, which would but impoverish the composi-
tion, to insist upon decisive, characteristic features.
Seen on a grand scale, the deformities of nature
lose their miserable aspect, and may appear in the
loftiest representations of painting, whether trans-
figured by the soul of the artist or used as a striking
contrast to beauty itself.

Style, then, in the art of the painter is not exactly
what it is in the art of the sculptor. One adores
beauty to such an extent as to fear expression,
which he lessens ; the other seeks expression, not
even rejecting ugliness, which he idealizes.

V.

PAINTING CAN ELEVATE ITSELF TO THE SUBLIME,
BUT BY THE INVENTION OF THE ARTIST RATHER THAN
BY THE APPLIANCES PECULIAR TO HIS ART.

IF the sublime be, as it were, a view of the in-
finite, it would seem that the arts of design, which
are compelled to imprison every idea in a form,
cannot be sublime. It may happen nevertheless
that the painter, moved by thoughts to which he
has given no form, strikes the soul as a thunder-
bolt would the ear. It is then by virtue of the
thought perceived but not formulated that the pic-
ture becomes sublime. *

Examples are rare. With regard to the sublime,
Rembrandt was the Shakespeare of painting. The
Gospel several times inspired him with ideas which
have been rendered by no contour and are indi-
cated only by the impalpable expression of light.
There is a hasty sketch by this great painter, in
bistre, of "The Supper at Emmaus." The artist
wished to translate the passage of Scripture, " Then
their eyes were opened and they recognized him,
but he disappeared from before them" In the
drawing of Rembrandt the figure of Christ is absent,
and upon the seat from which he has just vanished,

PAINTING. 23

we see only a fantastic and mysterious light. Aston-
ished, frightened at the disappearance of their guest
and the appearance of this light, the two disciples
devour with their eyes the vacant and illuminated
seat where a moment before they touched the hand
of a friend, heard his voice, and broke bread with
him. Is not that a stroke of sublimity, that im-
palpable light expressing at once a vanished God,
an invisible God ?

Nicholas Poussin touched the sublime when he
conceived one of his most celebrated pictures, " The
Shepherds of Arcadia." In a wild, woody country,
the sojourn of the happiness sung by the poets,
shepherds walking with their loves have discovered
under a thicket of trees a tomb, with this half
effaced inscription, Et in Arcadia ego (I, too, lived
in Arcadia). These words issuing from the tomb
sadden their faces and the smiles die upon their
lips. A young woman, nonchalantly leaning upon
the shoulder of her lover, remains mute, pensive,
and seems to listen to this salutation from the dead.
The idea of death ha£ also plunged into a reverie
a youth who leans over the tomb, with bowed head,
while the oldest shepherd points out with his finger
the inscription he has just discovered. The land-
scape that completes this quiet and silent picture
shows reddened leaves upon the arid rocks, hillocks
that are lost in the vague horizon, and afar off some-
thing ill-defined is perceived that resembles the sea.
The sublime in this picture is just that which one

24 PAINTING.

does not see ; it is the thought that hovers over it, the
unexpected emotion that fills the soul of the specta-
tor, transported suddenly beyond the tomb, into the
infinite unknown. Some words engraved upon mar-
ble are here the only form, the only sign of the sub-
lime. The painter remains, as it were, a stranger to
the moral shock the philosopher has wished to im-
press upon us. A greater painter than Poussin,
Rembrandt was able, in some sort, to bring the sub-
lime within the appliances of his art in expressing
it by light.

It is moreover with poetry as with painting. The
touches of genius of a Shakespeare, a Corneille, as
well as the grand passages of Scripture, have no
form, or have one in which art plays no role ; hence
they can be translated into all the languages of the
world. Emanating from the sentiment of the infi-
nite, the sublime in painting could not be attached
to a form, girdled by a contour. Whether it burst
forth in the work of Rembrandt, or is divined in the
picture of Poussin, the sublime is intangible as light,
invisible as the soul.

VI.

THE METHODS PECULIAR TO PAINTING FORCE THEM-
SELVES UPON THE ARTIST AS SOON AS HE INVENTS HIS
SUBJECT, AND CONCEIVES THE FIRST IMAGE OF IT.

THE aim of the arts of design being to manifest
the beautiful, to render it visible and palpable, the
plastic or representative form is essential, peculiar to
them. For painting, especially, the means are optical,
because it translates sentiments and ideas upon a
smooth surface, and its images, merely appearances,
do not depend upon the touch, which is the sight of
the body, but upon sight, which is the touch of the
soul.

To invent, for the painter, is to imagine, to bring
before his eyes the persons and things that he evokes
in his imagination, under the empire of a sentiment
that animates him, or a thought that besets him.
Here the grandeur of painting is at once attested by
the first of its laws, which is to choose the sentiments
or thoughts it will express, the figures it will repre-
resent, the theatre of action, the character of the
accompanying objects. The poet, the writer, know
of no monster so odious that art cannot make pleas-
ing to the eye, because the eyes to which poetry

26 PAINTING.

speaks are those of the mind ; but the painter of igno-
ble spectacles does not relate them; he shows them,
and having but an instant in which to show them, his
images strike us without warning, without preface ;
they are not only ignoble, but coarse ; they disgust
us. The first law, then, of painting, is to avoid
hideous or repulsive subjects.

Many people, it is true, affect to think that all sub
jects are good, and there is nothing ignoble in paint-
ing ; that there are no gluttons, no baboons that the
wit of Teniers does not make pleasing, that there is
no dirty vagabond under the pencil of Brauwer, that
Ostade interests us in the deformed, or rather un-
formed peasants that dance in a cabaret with the
elegance of bears, — but, if we admit this, we must
add that painters are not ignoble when they do not
intend to be so, or when their representations are
redeemed by a stroke of satire. When Brauwer
seeks vagrants in their cellars to imitate their horri-
ble grimaces, and their red, drunken faces ; when he
so sympathetically paints them vomiting wine and
insults, he employs a talent full of warmth, delicacy,
and harmony, to make us pardon what he wishes to
make us admire.

As soon as he chooses a subject, the artist should
think of the picturesque and distrust the literary
beauties which may have charmed him in the books
or recitals that have inspired it. What a painter
should borrow from a poet, is not what he has read
in his poems, but what he has seen ; the living, acting
idea, the sentiment when it becomes movement.

VOLTAIRE S STAIRCASE.

PAINTING. 29

Suppose a painter wishes to express what he has
heard, or has thought himself, that Voltaire is the
personification of the eighteenth century, that all
proceeds from his genius and is to be absorbed in it
again, that he is the centre whence issue and to which
return all the rays of philosophy. How could he give
a picturesque form to an idea so metaphysical, so
abstract ? An artist who excels in invention has
solved this problem in the happiest, the most admir-
able manner, in one of those cartoons ordered by the
State, in 1848, for the monumental decoration of the
French Pantheon. This cartoon represents " The
Staircase of Voltaire." We see ascending and de-
scending all the philosophers of the times, all distin-
guished for intelligence, with the exception of Rous-
seau, who, in the eighteenth century, was the precursor
of ours. Placed at the top of the stair-way, Voltaire
is dismissing one of his visitors, d'Alembert, to whom
he gives an article for the " Encyclopaedia." Upon
a lower step Diderot awaits the termination of the
adieus to accompany d'Alembert. Thus are formu-
lated in vivid images, in speaking figures, speculations
of the mind that one might have thought foreign to
painting, and it is by methods peculiar to it, that
painting has expressed them, by making them visible,
giving them a body.

In this same series of cartoons in which picturesque
invention abounds, and which were to form a univer-
sal history and palingenesis of the human race, the
author, Paul Chenavard, has consecrated one of the

30 PAINTING.

grandest compositions to the obscure beginnings of
Christianity, when the new god was noiselessly sapping
the foundations of pagan Rome. This vast scene is
divided into two horizontal zones. In the upper, rilled
with sunlight, passes the pompous and noisy cortege
of a triumphant Caesar, with his lictors, his generals,
his trophies, his conquered prisoners, his eagles, and
his elephants. The lower zone, silent and dark, rep-
resents the first Christians at prayer in the Catacombs,
which they have dug like a tomb under the steps of
the conqueror, and in which the Roman Empire will
soon be broken up. It is impossible to relate history
more clearly and vividly by the figurative language
of art, mute language that engraves itself upon the
memory of peoples in ineffaceable lines, like the elo-
quence of the Athenian orator which, left its needles
in the heart.

Invention is a rare quality among painters, rare even
among the great masters. Leonardo da Vinci, that
investigating genius, profoundly inquisitive, a prey to
all the disquietudes of his art, advised his pupils to
look sometimes attentively at the accidental spots
upon old walls, the jaspered stones, the veins of
marble, the shadings, as things offering to an idle
imagination singular combinations of lines and forms
and unexpected motives. Generally when they invent,
painters only find, invenire, in fable, poetry, religion,
history, subjects already invented by the poets,
already illustrated and consecrated by tradition. As
if imagination were a faculty rather Northern and

PAINTING. 31

Germanic, there have been few inventors more pow-
erful than Albert DUrer and Rembrandt. Moreover,
it has been agreed to regard as an invention of the
painter, every new manner of conceiving a known
subject.

Why are the men of the North more inventive ?
Perhaps because they are more habituated to interior
life, to meditation, reflection. Solitude is imperative
to facilitate that prolonged attention, that persistent
and profound meditation, which are the source of great
thoughts, because, little by little, warming the mind,
they end by enkindling enthusiasm. As a miser ever
finds opportunities for acquisition, because always
thinking of it, so the artist can find means of enrich-
ing his mind if his thoughts are ever thus directed.
Meditation is precisely what the painters of to-day
lack. Impatient to produce, urged on, eager to fol-
low the breathless march of a civilization driven by
steam, they do not give themselves time to meditate,
and that in an art for which all the men of genius
have worked as if they had no genius. " Painting,"
said Michael Angelo, " is a jealous Muse ; she desires
lovers who give themselves up to her without reserve,
with undivided heart."

Again, whether he invent his motives, or discovers
them in a poet, or renews them from the ancients, the
painter ought to conceive them in vivid figures, and,
drawing them from the vague obscurity in which im-
agination perceives them, make them visible, pal-
pable. If he is not the first creator of his thought,

32 PAINTING.

he ought to recreate it by rendering that which was
poetical picturesque, by making a representation
what was only an idea, a sentiment or a dream.

Thus from the moment of the birth of invention
the art of the painter is distinguished from all other
arts. For the pleasure of citing a hemistich of Hor-
ace the resemblance of painting to poetry has too
often been affirmed. It is fitting, in this book, to
show, not only the bonds that unite them, but the
Umits that separate them.

VII.

THE FIRST MEANS THE PAINTER USES TO EXPRESS
HIS THOUGHT IS ARRANGEMENT.

ONE day when Prud'hon was dining at the table
of M. Frochot, prefect of the Seine, that magistrate
expressed the desire that Prud'hon should paint a
picture to hang in the hall where the assizes of the
criminal court were held, and, in speaking of the
effect to be produced upon the accused, he quoted
these verses of Horace : —

" Raro antecedentem scelestum
Deseruit pede poena claudo."

" It is seldom that limping punishment does not overtake the criminal
it pursues."

At once Prud'hon rose and asked permission to
trace with a pen the desired picture, of which the
whole arrangement had presented itself to his im-
agination. With the eyes of his thought he saw the
flying criminal, antecedentem scelestum, and Justice
appeared to him, not limping as the poet represents
her, but cleaving the air in rapid flight and accom-
panied by another winged figure, divine Vengeance.
Prud'hon did not invent the subject, but he invented

3

34 PAINTING.

the arrangement, and he invented it with the genius
of a painter, by transfiguring the written image, giv-
ing it wings, instead of jcrutches. In a moment he
had indicated the great lines, sketched the figures
and their drapery, represented their pantomime, bal-
anced the masses, arranged the picture. Such are
the operations that constitute what we mean by
arrangement, and what we also call composition ; but
this latter word, whose signification is more extended,
includes the invention of the painter and the econ-
omy of his picture, to such an extent that it is often
used as a synonym of the picture itself. In its
more restricted acceptation, the composition is only
the arrangement, that is to say, the art1 of putting
in order the elements of the picture, of disposing
them, combining them, or, if one pleases, of distrib-
uting the roles to the actors of the drama, for the
Greeks called the composition the drama of the
painter, that is the mise en scene, without which the
composition alone would be the whole painting.

Two things are to be observed and reconciled in
the arrangement, — its optical beauty, that which re-
sponds to the pleasure of the eyes, and its moral or
poetical beauty, that which touches the feelings.
The first of these would be the most important, and
might almost suffice if the composition were purely
decorative, as would be, for instance, a painting rep-
resenting the pleasures of the harvest or the vintage.
But if the picture appeals to the mind or heart, if it
aims to excite the passions, the moral character of the

EXAMPLE OF SYMMETRICAL COMPOSITION ENTHRONED VIRGIN, BY CIO. BELLINI.

(Academy of Venice.)

PAINTING. 37

arrangement should take precedence of the pictur-
esque, which ought pitilessly to be sacrificed to the
expression if it is impossible to obtain both, to
strengthen one by the other. " Touch me, astonish
me, rend me, make me tremble, weep, shiver, anger
me, you may gratify my eyes afterwards if you can."
So said Diderot.

In the Gothic ages, when art was still in its infancy,
painters scarcely knew of more than one arrange-
ment,— symmetry; and there were several reasons
for this naive arrangement : first, the timid ignorance
of the early painters, who would have been embar-
rassed at a complicated composition, afterwards a
sort of pious ingenuousness and respect for sacred
subjects; for there is in symmetry something sacra-
mental and religious, because it corresponds to a
sentiment of immobility, of meditation and silence.
Besides it was not by movement and life that the
arts began. The first pictures, as well as the first
statues, have a stiffness, a grave and quiet look that,
by means of symmetry, becomes solemn.

In the human body, which is perfectly symmetrical,
the symmetry is apparent only when it is rigid and
motionless. As soon as the human figure moves, the
symmetry is broken by the movement, and in the
foreshortenings of perspective it escapes notice. The
figure, however, does not lose its symmetry ; what was
a coldly rigid regularity is replaced by another kind
of symmetry, which is equilibrium. The same phe-
nomenon manifests itself in art As soon as it has

3** PAJNTJNG.

attained maturity, feels itself bold and strong, it aban-
dons symmetrical compositions and substitutes for
them equilibrium. Instead of arranging its figures in
equal number, to right and left of the centre, paint-
ing introduces a certain balancing of corresponding
masses, compensates for the similitude of lines and
figures by the opposition of equivalent groups, so that
under the appearance of a facile liberty the composi-
tion maintains its equilibrium, and the eye, secretly
charmed, takes pleasure in the variety of the arrange-
ment, without perceiving the artificial and concealed
symmetry of it. This happens at the moment of vi-
rility, when painting advances from Giovanni Bellini
to Titian, from Verocchio to Leonardo, from Ghirlan-
dajo to Michael Angelo, from Perugino to Raphael. .

Of this transition from traditional and measured
art to free and vigorous painting we may see an illus-
trious example in one of the stanze of the Vatican.
Opposite the " Disputa," of which the upper part is
arranged according to the laws of the primitive regu-
larity, Raphael has painted " The School of Athens,"
which is not only a chef d'ceuvre of invention, draw-
ing, style, and expression, but is an incomparable
masterpiece of composition, the last expression of
genius in arrangement.

At the first look it is a fine disorder of figures that
seem grouped by chance meetings or isolated by
chance. There is such perfect verisimilitude in the
manner in which the groups are separated from and
yet united with each other, the gaps are so naturally

PAINTING. 39

filled or so happily managed, that one scarcely sus-
pects the intervention of art, in a combination nev-
ertheless so well meditated and so wise. Not hav-
ing put any apparent symmetry in the order of the
figures where it ought to be broken by life and
movement, Raphael has put it in the immovable
things, the architecture and the statues, to redeem by
the solidity of the foundation the simulated disorder
of the picturesque arrangement.

In addition, Raphael has supposed the spectator
placed in the axis of the vaulted edifice which shelters
this imaginary reunion of all the Greek philosophers.
But as no one personage should dominate in so august
an assemblage, presided over by the invisible spirit of
Philosophy itself, no figure is placed upon the median
line that passes between Plato and Aristotle, the two
geniuses who will forever dispute the empire of souls,
because one personifies sentiment, the other reason.
This is not the place to notice the exquisite propri-
ety with which all these heroes of the old world of in-
telligence are characterized ; Pythagoras writing his
harmonic tables, Epicurus crowned with vine leaves,
the grave Heraclitus, the cynical Diogenes, Socrates
arguing, Plato indoctrinating his own enthusiasm,
Aristotle explaining experiments, the Pyrrhonian
smiling at his doubts, the Eclectic gathering up his
notes, Archimedes tracing on the ground his geo-
metric problems, the astrologer Zoroaster, the geog-
rapher Ptolemy. If one considers onlv the beauty of

40 PAINTING.

the arrangement, " The School of Athens" is a model
forever admirable of the art that Raphael has inau-
gurated, of multiplying figures without confusion, of
peopling a canvas without overloading it, of securing
equilibrium without symmetry, and of diffusing unity,
without destroying it, in a charming variety.

Unity, that is the true secret of all composition.
But what is unity with respect to arrangement? It
signifies that in the choice of the great lines a certain
character should govern, that in the disposition of the
parts there should be a dominant. Why? Because
if man has two eyes he has only one sight, and he has
only one sight because he has but one soul.

Straight or curved, horizontal or vertical, parallel
or divergent all the lines have a secret relation to the
sentiment. In the spectacles of the world as in the
human figure, in painting as in architecture, the
straight lines correspond to a sentiment of austerity
and force, and give to a composition in which they
are repeated a grave, imposing, rigid aspect.

The horizontals, which express, in nature, the calm-
ness of the sea, the majesty of far-off horizons, the
vegetal tranquillity of the strong, resisting trees, the
quietude of the globe, after the catastrophes that
have upheaved it, motionless, eternal duration — the
horizontals in painting express analogous sentiments,
the same character of eternal repose, of peace, of du-
ration. If such are the sentiments the painter wishes
co evoke in us, if such is the character he wishes to
stamp upon his work, the horizontal lines should

E ">
I K

u I

PAINTING. 43

dominate in it, and the contrast of the other lines,
instead of attenuating the accent of horizontality will
render it still more striking. Witness " The Testa-
ment of Eudamidas;" in it Poussin has repeated the
horizontal lines. Lying upon his death-bed, the citi-
zen of Corinth forms the dominant line of the arrange-
ment. The lance of the hero repeats this line and,
prostrate like him, seems condemned to the repose of
its master and to affirm a second time his death.
The figures of the physician, the mother, and the
scribe are here opposed to the horizontal, but the
contrast has a little too much importance, and in
disputing the principal disposition enfeebles the
unity.

Look now at " The Life of Saint Bruno," by
Lesueur, in that admirable series of naive and touch-
ing pictures. The solemnity of the religious senti-
ment, which is an ascending aspiration, is expressed
in it by the dominant repetition and parallelism of
the verticals ; and this parallelism, which would be
only monotony if the painter had had other person-
ages to put upon the canvas, becomes an expressive
repetition, where it is necessary to render apparent
the respect and uniformity of the monastic rule, the
silence, meditation, renunciation of the cloister.

If it is necessary to represent a terrible idea, — for
instance, that of the last judgment; if one wishes to
recall the memory of a violent action, like the rape of
the Sabines or Pyrrhus saved, such subjects demand
lines vehement, impetuous, and moving. Michael An-

44 PAINTING.

gelo covers the wall of the Sistine Chapel with con-
trasting and flamboyant lines. Poussin torments and
twists his in the pictures of " Pyrrhus Saved " and
the " Sabines," and the linear modes employed by
these masters are examples of the law to be followed,
that of bringing back with decision to their domi-
nant character the whole of the great lines, that is to
say, the first means of expression, arrangement.

Those were very futile and false ideas which pre-
vailed in the schools of painting from the end of the
sixteenth century, thanks to the imitators, without
genius, of the genius of Michael Angelo. According
to their notions there should always and everywhere
be contrast; the lines, the angles, the groups, the
movements, the attitudes, the limbs, all ought to
combat, contradict each other, for the sake of a bril-
liant variety, whose effect, while amusing the eye
by oppositions, was to corrupt the eternal principle
of unity. Monstrous abuse! Even the impetuous
Diderot was shocked at it, and saw in this ill-under-
stood and continual contrast " one of the most fatal
causes of mannerism."

There was a time when the pyramidal arrangement
was set up as a principle by the rhetors of art, and it
was insisted upon for the groups as well as for the
entire picture. There is nothing more dangerous
than this pretended principle, for the pyramid con-
tains two contrary elements, the horizontal and the
perpendicular. But, from the moment that these
lines have a language that appeals to the sentiment, a

PAINTING. 45

moral signification, it is not fitting to leave the look
uncertain between these two directions ; the one must
dominate the other so that the horizontal shall govern
if the pyramid is very obtuse, and the vertical if it is
very acute. In the " Piece of a Hundred Florins," a
celebrated print of Rembrandt, in which Jesus Christ
is represented healing the sick, the composition is
developed decidedly in width, and the horizontal di-
rection triumphs over the pyramid formed by the
figure of Christ with the groups of sick that implore
help.

The " Transfiguration " of Raphael, so often criti-
cised as containing two pictures in one frame, betrays
a second time this faulty arrangement, which is made
still more apparent, by opposing to the pyramidal
mass of the upper group the horizontal mass formed
by the possessed of the devil and the apostles. It
is evident that the want of unity, which for once
escaped the notice of the great master, becomes more
striking by the unfortunate choice of two contrary
arrangements, which add optical duality to moral
duality.

Suppose, however, the painter wishes to represent
an Assumption of the Virgin, an Ascension of Jesus
Christ, the transport of a saint, an apotheosis, or any
other subject that naturally demands the pyramidal
disposition, the unity would not be lost, if the whole
of the composition, drawn as a lengthened oval, should
be finished in the lower portion as a reversed pyramid.
Raphael, who in spite of the instances quoted, is the
master par excellence, in arrangement, has thus com-

46 PAINTING.

posed the " Sistine Madonna," by opposing to the
pyramidal lines of the heavenly apparition the very
narrow base formed by the two cherubs grouped in
the middle of the lower plinth which forms the sup-
port of an open window upon the balcony.

Whether one considers the optical beauty of the
arrangement, or regards it as the rough draught of
the expression, unity is the one principle, the true
secret. As Montabert has judiciously written (Trait'e
complet de Peinture), we must not say to the painter :
" Compose pyramidally, stuff up the holes, do not leave
gaps, avoid angles and parallels, seek contrasts ; " we
should say : " Compose according to your feeling, but
whatever your combinations, bring back the lines, the
groups, the masses, the directions, the dimensions to
the unity you may have chosen, and have felt."

By unity, the artist can make all methods of arrang-
ing a picture successful : the convex that pleased
Rubens and Correggio, which brings the principal
figures into relief ; the concave, employed by Raphael
in the " Disputa," which is another way of concentrat-
ing the looks ; the diagonal, as in the " Descent from
the Cross " of Rubens, which arrests the attention by
an unforeseen obliquity ; and the strange distributions
of Rembrandt, which, dictated by the emotion of
genius, seem to address themselves only to the eye of
the soul.

That the forms of the border ought to be indicated
by the dominant line of the picture, is a truth often
misunderstood and nevertheless so apparent that it

PAINTING. 47

seems superfluous to insist upon it. A couchant
Cleopatra, a sleeping Ariadne, forming a horizontal,
would be badly placed in an upright frame. At Ver-
sailles there are piers, very long vertically, rilled with
military subjects whose horizontality is in shocking
contradiction to the form of the panel. Everybody
knows, from the print of Pradier, the beautiful com-
position of Ingres, " Virgil reading the ^Eneid." The
painter intended to represent it horizontally, but
when it occurred to him to put in the background
the statue of Marcellus, lifting itself before the eyes
of Livy, as the spectre of remorse evoked by the
verse, " Tu Marcellus eris," the whole idea of the
composition was changed, and the height became
dominant, that the proportions of the picture might
conform to the new direction taken by the thought of
the painter, indicated by the poetic apparition of this
phantom of marble, vaguely repeated by its shadow
on the wall of the palace of Caesar.

VIII.

ALTHOUGH THE PAINTER WHO COMPOSES HIS PIC-
TURE OUGHT CERTAINLY TO BE ACQUAINTED WITH
THE LAWS OF PERSPECTIVE AND SUBMIT TO THEM,.
THE OBSERVANCE OF THESE LAWS ALLOWS SUFFICIENT
PLAY OF SENTIMENT.

THE painter having to hollow fictitious depths
upon a smooth surface, and to give to these depths
the same appearance they would have in nature,
must of necessity know the laws of perspective, that
is, the science of apparent lines and colors.

In accordance with the manner in which the eye
is formed, the height and size of all objects diminish
in proportion to the distance whence they are seen,
and all lines parallel to the visual ray seem to con-
verge towards the point of the horizon to which
the looks are directed. Some are lowered, others
elevated, and all unite together at the point upon a
level with the eye, which is called the point of sight.
Again, in proportion to the distance of objects from
us, the contour becomes less marked, the form more
vague, and the color paler, less decided. What was
angular becomes rounded, what was brilliant loses
color, the layers of air interposed between the things

PAINTING. 49

looked at and the eye that sees them, are like a
veil that renders them confused, and if the atmos-
phere is thick and loaded with vapor, the confusion
increases and the spectacle is lost. These two phe-
nomena— the convergence of sloping lines and the
gradation of colors — have given rise to the distinc-
tion of two kinds of perspective, in painting, linear
and aerial. The latter is imposed upon the painter
only when he finishes his picture ; when he puts in,
with the colors, the lights and shadows ; we shall
speak of it when we come to consider chiaro 'scuro,
coloring and touch. The artist, at the moment in
which he arranges his picture, that is to say, at the
moment in which he assigns to each figure and to
each object the place it is to occupy, takes into ac-
count only linear perspective. Now what is a pic-
ture, properly so called, in painting ? It is' the rep-
resentation of a scene of which the whole can be
embraced at one glance. Man having but one soul,
his two eyes give him but one view. Unity, then, is
essential to every spectacle that addresses itself to
the soul. If the wish be simply to amuse by optical
artifices and to excite the curiosity of the spectator
by procuring for him, in a series of varied scenes,
the pleasures of a momentary and material illusion,
unity is no longer necessary, because the artist, in-
stead of conceiving a picture, is arranging the ma-
chinery of a panorama. On the contrary, as soon as
the painter wishes to express a thought or awake a
sentiment, it is indispensable that the action should

PAINTING.

be one, that is to say, that all parts of the picture
should concur in one dominant action. But unity of
action is inseparable from unity of place, and unity

o

s

ol

SJ8

of place involves unity of the visual point, without
which the spectator, drawn in different directions,
would be as if transported to several places at the
same time. It seems, then, that unity is more neces-

PAINTING. 5 1

sary in a poem of images and colors than in a writ-
ten poem or tragedy, because in painting the place is
immovable, the time indivisible, and the action in-
stantaneous.

That determined, how shall the artist submit to
the unity of one point of sight the scene that his
imagination has invented, or that it evokes by mem-
ory ? Experience teaches us that our eyes can take
in an object at one look only at a distance equal to
about three times the greatest dimension of the ob-
ject. For instance, to see at one glance a stick a
yard long, we must, if endowed with ordinary sight,
place ourselves at a distance of three yards. Sup-
pose the painter looks at a landscape from the win-
dow of his room, the objects presented to his view
will be so numerous and will occupy so vast an ex-
tent that he will be obliged to turn his head and run
his eye over the landscape to see, one after another,
the different points. If he retires into the chamber
the extent will diminish, and if the window be a yard
wide and he withdraws to a distance of three yards,
this distance will furnish the measure of the space he
can take in at one look. The window will form the
frame of his picture ; and if we suppose that instead
of canvas or paper, it is a single square of glass that
fills the aperture, and that the artist with a long pen-
cil could sketch upon the glass the contour of the
objects as they present themselves, his sketch would
be the exact representation of the landscape which

52 PAINTING.

will be drawn according to the rules of perspective,
since the perspective will draw itself.

Hence, a draughtsman with a trained, a correct
eye, could put in perspective all that he draws, with-
out the aid of geometrical operations ; but for this it
would be necessary that the picture he traces should
be always beautiful enough and sufficiently con-
formed to his idea to remain invariable ; for if the
artist wishes to displace a line, to change a figure, to
efface a rock or a tree, to add a building, or simply to
put at a distance what was near, and to draw near
what was far off, the correctness of his eye will no
longer suffice : the perspective no longer drawing it-
self upon the glass transformed into a canvas, the
painter must have recourse to the laws that observa-
tion has discovered and geometry formulated.

These laws of perspective are simple, and are in-
teresting and admirable from their very simplicity.
They were known to the ancients, and in the fifth
century before our era, the Athenians who heard the
tragedies of ^Eschylus could admire upon the stage a
fictitious architecture designed by Agatharcus. Two
pupils of this artist-geometrician, Democritus and
Anaxagoras, published the theory of perspective, and
later, Pamphylus publicly taught it at Sicyon. At
the epoch of the Renaissance, perspective was redis-
covered or reinvented by the Italian masters that
flourished in the fifteenth century, — Brunelleschi,
Masaccio, Paolo Uccello, and Piero della Francesca.
The last wrote a treatise upon it. Uccello found

PAINTING. 53

such delight in it that he devoted his life to it, study-
ing day and night, saying to his wife, who remon-
strated at his depriving himself of sleep, " Oh ! what
a charming thing perspective is." " Oh / che dolce
cosa e questa prospettiva" In our day the illustrious
geometrician, Monge, upon the foundation of de-
scriptive geometry, of which he had made a body of
science, furnished a rigorous demonstration of per-
spective when the books of Albert Diirer, of Jean
Cousin, Peruzzi, Serlio, Vignole, Dubreuil, and Des-
argues, contained little more than affirmed results.
Now, perspective, clearly explained in the " Elements"
of Valenciennes, animated with spirit in the different
works of Adhemar, considered by M. de La Gour-
nerie in its effects and in its relations to theatrical
painting and decoration, simplified in the new Theory
of Sutter, perspective, we say. can be easily and
thoroughly learned.

In studying these authors the artist will learn that
— the picture being generally considered as a plane
placed vertically — he ought to preface the opera-
tions of perspective by establishing three lines. The
first is the fundamental or ground line which forms
the base of the picture, the second is the horizon
line, which is always on a level with the eye, and
determines the position, as above or below, of the ob-
jects looked at, the third is a vertical line that cuts
the first two at right angles, and which, ordinarily,
divides the picture into two equal parts.

The point at which the visual ray perpendicular to

54 PAINTING.

the picture meets it, is called in perspective the point
of sight. It is found at the extremity of the ray
which passes from the eye of the spectator to the
horizon, and as the horizon rises in proportion to the
elevation of the eye, and descends as the eye is low-
ered, the visual ray terminates at the horizon, what-
ever its elevation upon the vertical line. The point
of sight and the horizon line being determined upon
the picture, measure the distance at which the spec-
tator should place himself, to see the picture as the
painter saw it ; in other words, measure the length of
the visual ray. This ray, being perpendicular to the
eye, is, so far as the eye is concerned, but a single
point. To see its true size, we suppose it lowered
upon the prolonged horizon line, and the point where
this lowered line ends is called the point of distance,
which ought to be as far from the point of sight as
the spectator is distant from the picture. These are
the two points and the three lines that serve to con-
struct all good perspective. He must also take ac-
count of the numerous exceptions certain objects
may present, which have no regular relation to the
picture — as, for instance, a chair overthrown by
chance in a room — and whose horizontal lines will
terminate at an accidental point placed upon the
horizon. If we suppose the chair tipped over upon
another, in such a way as to rest upon the floor or to
have its four legs in the air, the accidental point
would be above or below the horizon.

To resume, the masters of perspective will teach
the artist : —

PAINTING. 55

That all the lines perpendicular to the picture con-
verge at the point of sight ;

That all the lines parallel to the base of the pic-
ture have their apparent perspective parallel to this
base ;

That all the horizontal lines forming with the pic-
ture an angle of 45 degrees, converge at the point of
distance ;

That all the horizontal lines parallel with each
other, but not with the picture, converge at the same
point upon the horizon line ;

That all the parallel oblique lines converge at a
point that may be above or below the horizon, within
or without the picture, according to the situation of
the lines ;

That all the objects diminish in every way, in pro-
portion to their distance from the observer.

Thus, the point of sight being placed in the cen-
tre of the composition forms there a star, whose rays
are the sloping lines perpendicular to the picture,
and as some descend to the horizon and others as-
cend to it, the horizon line divides the picture into
two fans, opened in opposite directions, and cut by
the four sides of the frame and by the lines parallel
to its sides.

Remarkable union ! the sight of our eye resembles
perfectly the sight of our reason, and optics is in na-
ture what it is in philosophy. The difference in the
point of sight changes the moral perspective of ideas
as well as the linear perspective of things, and ac-

PAINTING.

cording to the point of distance at which our mind is
placed, it seizes only details the prominence of which

deceives or embraces the whole whose grandeur en-
lightens it. Moreover, physical perspective, however
rigorously the rule and compass of the geometrician

PAINTING. 57

may be applied, rests submissively under the empire
of sentiment. Louis David used to say to his pu-
pils : " Other painters know the laws of perspective
better than I, but they don't feel them so well." This
signifies clearly enough that knowledge alone does
not suffice to the artist when he traces the perspec-
tive of his picture ; sentiment also should find its
place in it. We shall see, indeed, that sentiment
ought to direct, one by one, all the operations of the
painter ; determine the height of the horizon, the
choice of the visual point, the point of distance, and
the size of the optical angle.

The elevation of the horizon. Although the line of
the horizon is curved, owing to the spherical form of
the earth, this curvature is so microscopic and inap-
preciable that it may be replaced by a straight line.
But at what elevation should the horizon be
drawn ? If one wishes to paint a sea view, the hor-
izon will naturally be the line that separates the sea
from the sky, for the horizon is only the level of the
sea that we should perceive if the land and the
mountains that conceal it were transparent. Taste
teaches that the elevation of the horizon in the pic-
ture should depend upon the subject the painter has
chosen and the number of figures he wishes to place
upon the canvas.

If he desires to represent a public fete, like the
" Kermesse," of Rubens, or a magnificent festival,
like the " Marriage at Cana," of Paul Veronese, it is
evident he must elevate the horizon to show as large

58 PAINTING,

a number of persons as possible, and to unfold the
scene to the eye of the spectator as he would see it
if he were placed upon a terrace or behind a window,
which, for him, would be the frame of the picture.

David, wishing to paint the " Serment du jeu
de Paume," imagined himself standing upon a
table, whence he could see all the groups and all
the movements of the assembly. Gros, to bring out
the dark battle-field of Eylau, has placed the horizon
level with an eminence, whence he could have taken
in, in its whole extent, the entire spectacle of this
great disaster. "When the picture," says Adhemar
(" Supplement to the Treatise upon Perspective "),
" represents a room in which are several persons,
some seated, others standing, the horizon should be
on a level with a person standing. In this case, the
spectator will have the same impression as if he
were standing near those represented in the picture.
If the subject contains only two or three persons
seated, one will do well to place the horizon on a
level with their eyes. After some moments' atten-
tion, the spectator might believe he is himself seated
beside them, and taking part in their conversation.
But if one of them should appear to raise the head a
little, as if he were looking 'at some one standing, it
would be necessary, as in the preceding example, to
place the horizon on a level with the person stand-
ing."

Let us suppose, now, that the artist has to com-
pose a picture for a fixed place, or a wall painting at

PAINTING. 59

a determined height ; the horizon line will be chosen
in conformity therewith, but with a certain manage-
ment, or at need, with certain tricks favorable to the
view. The celebrated painter, Mantegna, having a
commission from the Marquis of Gonzaga to paint
the " Triumph of Julius Caesar," which was to adorn
the palace of Mantua, and to be placed higher than
the eye of the spectator, took care to place the first
figures upon the ground line forming the base of the
picture, then the feet and legs of the persons in the
middle distance gradually disappeared in accordance
with the given line of the horizon and geometric
laws. The litters, the vases, the eagles, and the
trophies borne in triumph, he drew so that the eye
perceived only the bottom. Vasari praises highly this
scrupulous observance of the laws of perspective.
But should truth be carried so far as to astonish the
eye by showing it singularities that confound it ? It
may happen that the eye is justly offended by the
very precautions one takes not to offend it, and that
the spectator, not taking into account the horizon
line that the painter has chosen, finds bizarre what is,
nevertheless, justified by geometric science. The es-
sential thing in painting is to move or captivate the
soul, even at the expense of the rigorous laws of sce-
nography, or at least by a slight infraction of these
laws.

The point of sight. The point of sight is always
upon the line of the horizon, but upon what point
of this line should it be placed ? In the middle

60 PAINTING.

of the picture ? To right or left more or less near
the frame ? Here also the artist takes counsel of the
sentiment. The great masters in their most famous
compositions, — Leonardo da Vinci in the " Last Sup-
per," Raphael in the " Disputa," the " Heliodorus "
and the " School of Athens," Poussin in the " Judg-
ment of Solomon," Lesueur in the " St. Paul at
Ephesus," — have fixed their point of sight either at
the centre of the picture, — that is at the intersection
of the diagonals, — or at equal distance from the lateral
lines of the frame. There results a symmetry which
has something grave, calm, majestic ; that is perfectly
in keeping with religious subjects and the imposing
scenes of history. The optical equilibrium produced
by the equality of the masses that correspond to each
other, produces in the mind a sort of moral equilibrium.
Wherever the architecture furnishes a perspective
clearly defined, the point of sight placed in the mid-
dle of the scene calls the attention of the spectator at
first to it, afterwards recalls it to the same point. If,
for instance, Jesus Christ is seated in the centre of
the picture in the Last Supper, the lines that con-
verge at the point of sight constantly bring back the
visual ray to the dominant figure, to the knot of the
drama, where emotion is concentrated, where, cease-
lessly, the eyes of the mind turn. Solomon, seated
on the throne from which he is to render judgment,
seems to me still more justly placed, in a composition
whose rigorous balancing seems an allusion to the
sovereign impartiality of the judge who occupies the

PAINTING. 6 1

centre of it. And if we would borrow from contem-
poraneous art an illustrious example, we shall see the
author of the "Apotheosis of Homer" add to the
solemnity of his arrangement an august equilibrium,
by choosing the point of sight, indicated by symme-
try, to place in it the venerable figure of the poet
between the " Iliad " and the " Odyssey," in the very
axis of the temple where he is to be deified, and
which serves as a background to the spectacle of
his coronation.

There are excellent painters who have often placed
the point of sight at the side of the picture, not far
from the edge. Lesueur himself, in the twenty-two
admirable compositions that form the " Life of St.
Bruno," has almost invariably supposed the spectator
to be at the right or left of the middle line. Some-
times his point of sight is fixed upon one of the lat-
eral lines of the frame, so that one composition seems
to be the half of another ; for instance, that which
represents St. Bruno distributing his goods to the
poor. One might believe that these quiet images of
the life of the cloister, these scenes of melancholy
austerity, would gain by presenting more perspective
equilibrium, less inequality in the masses separated
by the point of sight. But it is proper to observe
that, compositions forming a single history, a single
whole, may complete themselves to the look in such
a way that one picture may balance that which pre-
cedes or that which follows. One might say also
that Lesueur, in throwing the point of sight to the

62 PAINTING.

corner of the picture, has wished to express the dis-
tance of the profane eye, and to raise only a corner
of the veil that conceals from the cenobites the
things of the world.

Raphael, in the most animated scenes, keeps the
central position of the point of sight ; thus he puts
the movement of the figures in opposition to the im-
mobility of the architecture. In painting his sub-
lime fresco of " Heliodorus," in which we see the
sacrilegious robber overthrown by a miraculous
horseman, and whipped with rods by two angels that
cleave the air with rapid flight, Raphael doubtless
thought of the contrast the quietude of a symmet-
rical architecture would produce, with the impetuous
movements of the celestial cavalier who rides down
Heliodorus and the angels that strike him with rods ;
while the high-priest, Onias, in the depths of the
sanctuary, where all the sloping lines of the perspec-
tive converge, is still asking of Jehovah the miracle
already accomplished, overwhelming and swift as
lightning. .

The equilibrium produced by placing the point of
sight in the middle of the horizon line, may serve,
sometimes, to strengthen the picture if it is calm,
sometimes to heighten the movement if it is dra-
matic. But the example of Raphael suggests to us
another observation ; it is that in mural painting the
real architecture dominates the fictitious, and it
would be shocking to place upon a wall a perspec-
tive which would suppose the spectator at an impos-

PAINTING. 63

sible place, and which would be falsified by the sur-
rounding construction.

The role of sentiment is so great in painting, even
when geometry dominates, that a certain great
painter has allowed himself two horizon lines in one
picture, and we pardon this license. Paul Veronese.
in the " Marriage at Cana," considers the horizon
line, not as a line without breadth, but as a zone
which allows two points of convergence, the one
above the other. Veronese did this for two reasons :
first, because the lofty architecture of the picture
would have presented lines sloping too much, whose
direction towards a single point would have been too
precipitate and without grace ; then, because before
a picture so large, filled with episodes and without
rigorous unity, since he could only express the gen-
eral joy and the pleasing disorder of a feast, at which
Jesus himself plays merely the role of a guest, the
spectator is to be interested successively by the dif-
ferent groups, and to walk before the picture rather
than to fix his eye upon the point of sight.

The point of distance, that which marks the dis-
tance of the spectator from the picture, is also under
the empire of sentiment. Balthazar Peruzzi and
Raphael, according to Lomazzo (" Trattato della Pit-
tura "), thought " that the artist who wishes to paint
the fagade of a house in a narrow street, is not
obliged to represent objects according to their dis-
tance from the opposite wall, but he ought to draw
them according to an imaginary distance, supposed

64 PAINTING.

greater, and which would be equal to three times the
height of the fa£ade, else the figures painted would
seem to stumble and fall backward (trabbocare e ca-
dersi addosso).

At present it is a fixed rule for designers who have
to put in perspective the interior of a chamber or
gallery, to draw it, not as they see it, but as they
would see it if they could withdraw to a distance
that supposes the overthrow of the wall against
which they lean. Although this distance is arbi-
trary, it must in all cases be so great that the
spectator may take in the whole of the picture at one
glance, without moving the head, else the objects
near the frame would undergo those monstrous
changes that in perspective are called anamorphoses.
A column, for instance, showing its base when seen
from above and its capital seen from below, would
be an architectural member unrecognizable by the
abrupt diminution of the capital, which would seem
to fall inwards, and of the base, which would appar-
ently fall outwards. Every one has remarked the
angular deformity presented by the photographs of
the Bourse at Paris. To avoid such deformities and
have an agreeable view of the building, the photog-
rapher would be obliged to retire to a distance
rendered impossible by the surrounding buildings.
This withdrawal the painter secures fictitiously by
the methods of perspective, which allow him to rec-
tify what he sees by drawing it as he would see it at
a suitable distance. The photographer who wishes to

PAINTING. 65

have a faithful portrait, without diminution of the
extremities, must, according to MM. Babinet and de
la Gournerie, place his instrument ten metres from
the model. Mathematical truth is not of the same
nature as picturesque truth. So it constantly hap-
pens that the geometrician says one thing and our
mind another. If I see a man five feet off, his appar-
ent diameter is double what it would be if I saw
him at a distance of ten feet ; science affirms it, and
does not deceive ; nevertheless, this man will always
appear to me of the same size, and the error of my
mind will be as infallible as the truth of the geom-
etrician. That is a mystery that mathematics cannot
explain, as Voltaire observes in the " Philosophy of
Newton." " Whatever supposition one makes," says
he, " the angle at which I see a man at the distance
of five feet, is always double the angle at which I see
him at ten, and neither geometry nor physics can
resolve the problem." We need, in truth, something
besides physics and geometry to explain how the tes-
timony of our eyes is contradicted by a decree of
sentiment, and how an incontestable truth may be
overcome by an irresistible falsehood.

The optical angle. The angle of which Voltaire
here speaks, is the optical angle. This is formed by
two visual rays which pass from the centre of the
eye to the extremities of the object seen. The
opening of the optical angle depends upon the dis-
tance of the spectator from the picture, for the nearer
an object is to the eye, the wider the eye opens to

66 PAINTING.

see it. But this angle cannot be greater than a right
angle ; in other words, the greatest space that the eye
can take in is included in a quarter of the circumfer-
ence. In painting, every representation ought to be
seen at a single optical angle, or, as said Leonardo
da Vinci, " from a single window " (" la pittura tfeve
esser vista da una sola finestra "). Through this win-
dow of the eye the mind can embrace but one picture
at a time. But the visual rays that transmit it are
of very unequal strength. The only powerful ray
is that which is perpendicular to the retina ; all the
others grow feeble in proportion to their distance
from this normal ray, so that the more the angle is
opened by the nearness of the spectator, the more
weak rays it contains ; the more the angle is lessened
by the distance of the object, the more powerful rays
it contains. Thus, short-sighted persons partially
close the eyes to concentrate their vision by drawing
the extreme rays, which are weak, nearer to the nor-
mal ray, which is the only strong one.

But while the oblique rays become feebler, the ob-
jects are lessened by distance, the color fades out,
sharpness of contour is lost. Thus man can see in
their true size, that is geometrically, only the things
that are perpendicular to his retina, and at a certain
distance ; for the geometrical image of an object is
that seen in its real dimensions by an eye as large as
it ; everything greater than the eye is seen in perspec
tive, that is, in its apparent dimensions.

Strange and beneficent illusion, which testifies a,
the same time to our littleness and our grandeur

PAINTING.

67

Only the eye of God can see the universe geometric-
ally ; man, in his infirmity, seizes only foreshortenings.

Yet as if all nature were subject to him he runs his
intelligent eye over it, and each of his movements
changing his point of sight, the lines come of them-
selves to converge there and form for him a specta-
cle always changing, always new. Perspective is, so
to say, the ideal of visible things, and it is not sur-
prising that the old Italian master vaunted its
charms. But this ideal, like the other, ceaselessly flies
and escapes us. Always within reach of the eye, we
can never seize it. As man advances towards his
horizon, his horizon retreats from him, and the lines
that seem to unite in the remote distance, remain
eternally separate in their eternal convergence. Man
bears within himself, as it were, a mobile poetry that
obeys the will of his movements, and that seems to
have been given him to veil the nakedness of the
true, to correct the rigor of the absolute, and to soften
in his eyes the inexorable laws of the divine geom-
etry.

IX.

COLORING HIS SKETCH OR LIMITING HIMSELF TC
OUTLINE IN HIS COMPOSITION, THE PAINTER ATTAINS
EXPRESSION ONLY IN DEFINING IT BY THE DRAWING,
THE ATTITUDE, THE GESTURE, OR THE MOVEMENT OF
EACH FIGURE.

COMPOSITION is not improvised. The excited painter
may, in a moment of inspiration, see a composition
before the eyes of his thought, but he must study it,
prove its verisimilitude, submit it to the decision of
his judgment.

" What ! improvise ! " wrote Eugene Delacroix ;
" sketch and finish at the same time, satisfy the imag-
ination and the judgment at one stroke, in the same
breath! That would be speaking the language of
the gods with one's every-day tongue. Would one
know what resources talent has for concealing its
efforts ? Who can say what an admirable passage
may have cost ? At the most, what one might call
improvisation would be rapid execution without re-
touching or changing ; but without the sketch wisely
studied, in view of complete finishing, this sleight-of-
hand would be impossible, even to an artist like Tin-
toretto, who is called the most impassioned of painters,

PAINTING. 69

or to Rubens himself. With Rubens especially, this
supreme labor, those last touches that complete the
thought of the artist, are not, as from their strength
and firmness one might believe, the labor that has
excited to the highest pitch the creative force of the
painter. It is in the conception of the whole, from the
first lineaments of the picture ; it is in the arrange-
ment of the parts, that the most powerful of his facul-
ties is exercised ; it is there he has truly labored."

Thus speaks an artist who had the fever of his art,
who was impassioned often even to delirium. Like
the orator who heard the murmurs of the people in
the dash of the waves, the painter must create his
picture, thinking of the spectators present or future
who will judge it; he must prepare himself to speak
the language of the gods.

But how shall the artist test his composition ?
Ought he at first to try colors, and, necessarily, light,
and shadow, or shall he sketch the expression of his
thought by lines alone ? Very great masters — Mi-
chael Angelo, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, Julio Ro-
mano— have drawn their sketches as if they planned
a bas-relief. Before thinking of coloring, of lighting
up their picture, they fixed the construction and the
form of it. Nevertheless, if painting be inseparable
from color and light, it seems as if the pencil and
charcoal are not enough for the artist who composes ;
that it is important to represent to himself, palette in
hand, the kind of effect that will aid the expression
to be produced. Rembrandt no sooner conceived a

70 PAINTING.

picture than, in thought, he lighted it up. Rubens
foresaw the play of color, even in a sketch in which
he only indicated the masses of light and shadow.
Prud'hon also always invents in connection with
light ; as soon as he imagines his drama, he sees it
by the light of the sun, or the rays of the moon, or
the light of torches. How shall we decide between
methods so different and geniuses so diverse ? Must
we condemn the great Italians for having given so
decided a preference to drawing in the sketch of
their works ? No. These masters, par excellence,
were above all things preoccupied with the moral
element, — the expression. Color, which speaks to
the senses rather than to the mind, seemed to them
more external, hence, secondary. All composition
was good to them, so soon as its lines were appro-
priately disposed, balanced, and arranged ; they ren-
dered it expressive by the character of the forms, the
language of the drawing, the choice of the contour.

Let us imagine Michael Angelo tracing with the
pen the composition of the " Last Judgment," of
which the sketches have been preserved. With a
sovereign will, a master-hand, he draws figures and
groups whose movement and violence he foresees.
There exist upon the paper, as yet, only some manly
and rapid strokes, but already we seize the web of
this great tragedy: we see a troop of threatening
angels coming from the upper air bearing the instru-
ments of the Passion, as if to crush humanity with
them ; we divine the Christ hurling down his thun-

PAINTING. 73

derbolts ; we perceive avalanches of the condemned
cast into the abyss ; we anticipate the terror that will
fill all soulsj even those of the martyrs who display
the marks of their tortures, trembling lest they
may not have deserved celestial pardon.

Through these pen-scratches appear astonished
patriarchs, women filled with anguish, the Virgin,
who seems frightened at having given birth to a
God so terrible. The most hideous sins are rolled
pell-mell together, the dead awake, hell yawns, and
all this is expressed only by an entanglement of
heroic lines ; the groups unite, the composition
grows complicated, the arrangement perfects itself;
and all that the fresco will reveal is already foreseen
in this sublime confusion. Without having recourse
to the effects of color and light, the painter will at-
tain his supreme aim, he will have expressed the sen-
timent of inexpressible terror.

Let us suppose now that a genius of the North, a
Rembrandt, dreams of painting such a scene ; he
will take another road to reach the depths of our
soul ; this immense drama will begin to unravel itself
by spots of color as if through clouds. In the in-
finite depth of the shadows we shall see nations
emptying their tombs ; the joy of the blessed will be
indicated by the brilliancy of the coloring ; terror
will be expressed by dark tints rather than by dis-
torted or violent forms. The souls uncertain of their
fate will be enveloped in a mysterious half-light.
The radiant heaven, the sombre earth, will mark the

74 PAINTING.

contrast of eternal destinies, and hell will be enkin-
dled at the fires of color. s

Thus great painters, varying their methods accord-
ing to their genius, may disconcert the philosophy of
art, 2nd constrain her to change, or at least to modify
her laws.

Nevertheless, the art of the painter, having now
passed through the entire cycle of its developments,
can no longer neglect the effects of color and of
chiaro 'scuro, so far as they are expressive. The age
of painting is too far advanced to go back to the
epochs in which its youth allowed it to perform prod-
igies, without at the same time employing all its re-
sources. We may then regard as preferable the col-
oring of the sketch, above all when we wish to ob-
tain the expression that results from color and light,
an expression that harmonizes with nature, and is so
important in landscape. But the great painters who
make the woof of their work of human figures will
none the less continue to seek expression by the atti-
tude, the gesture, or the movement of these figures.

It is not with painting as with sculpture ; the figures
of the painter having neither thickness nor weight,
being only pure appearances, may assume attitudes,
make gestures that it would be impossible to execute
in marble. Moderation of movement, sobriety of ges-
ture, are the inherent laws of sculpture ; they are de-
manded both by the solidity of the statue and its dig-
nity, for it is not only because his figures are heavy,
that an extravagant, outr& gesture is forbidden to the

PAINTING. 75

sculptor ; but because the divine forms of calm
beauty suit beings whose image is to last for ages,
and their movements, drawn not from beyond life,
but from above it, ought to manifest a soul serene as
that of the immortal gods, or of heroes that are to
become such.

Less restricted in his flight, bolder and freer, the
painter may represent attitudes that would be incom-
patible with the gravity of marble. He may hazard
movements that reveal the fire of passion, gestures
that betray the boiling of the blood in the heart.
But here, still, the imitation of nature does not alone
suffice to the painter more than to the sculptor ; there
must be choice, there must be style.

Listen to a passionate man ; observe him ; his words
like his gestures will reveal in a striking and true
manner the passion that animates him ; but it may be
that his angry words are an ignoble truth, and the
excess of his gestures a repulsive one. It may be
also, for want of sufficient vitality, he manifests im-
perfectly the emotions his feeble soul experiences.
Hence, for the poet and the painter, the necessity of
softening what nature has marked too strongly, or of
accentuating with energy what she has expressed too
feebly. The observation of natural pantomime is an
excellent study, upon condition that the artist knows
how, sometimes, to render it more significant, some-
times to spy out the moment in which it is energetic,
without being mean.

But the gesture is not only individual, that is to

76 PAINTING,

say, modified by temperament ; it varies also in char-
acter according to customs and ideas, according to
climate, and each nation stamps upon it the imprint
of its own genius. What a difference between the
reserve of an Englishman, and the grimacing mim-
icry of a Neapolitan ? How, then, can we discover
the principle of the gesture among such variations ?
Is it possible, among such slight differences, to un-
ravel the generic accents ? Yes. In spite of its va-
riations, the gesture has its roots in the human heart,
and it is possible to find them again there. What-
ever may be, for instance, the different signs of ven-
eration, it expresses itself, in all the countries of the
world, by a tendency to bow the head and bend the
body, as if to represent the inferiority of him who
venerates in presence of him who is venerated.
While the European of the North will indicate his
respect by a cold inclination of the head, the man of
Southern blood will bend himself double, and the
Oriental, concealing his face, will prostrate himself
to the earth. But all the degrees, marked or slight,
will be included between these two extremes, and the
artist will have a whole scale of differences from
which to choose his pantomime.

If the gestures and the movements of man were all
dictated by the organism, there would be more re-
semblance between them, because the arrangement of
the human machine would produce them in a fixed
manner, without other diversities than those of tem-
perament, weak or energetic, generous or cold. But

PAINTING.

77

there are movements, gestures, and attitudes, that
have their source in the depths of the soul, and
whose external manifestation is only a feeble echo, a
symbol of that which agitates the world of imagina-

ATTITUDE OF PROPHET ISAIAH, BY MICHAEL ANGELO.

(Sistine Chapel.)

tion, that inner world in which pass the dreams of
the sleeper and the reveries of the waking man. Ges-
ture, like speech, has its metaphors. We reject an
ill-sounding proposition almost as we would repulse
a dangerous beast; we shrink from the recital of a

7° . PAINTING.

horror as we would from the reality of a frightful
spectacle. The orator who is meditating his ha-
rangues, and who wishes to electrify his imaginary
audience, needs to move, to keep step with his
speech, as Rousseau did when along the highway he
declaimed his impassioned prosopopoeias. It is not
by a cursory look at Nature that the artist will find
the expression of those pantomimes which reveal
the secret evolutions of thought. When Michael

ATTITUDE OF AZA. BY MICHAEL ANGELO.

(Sistine Chapel.)

Angelo, decorating the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,
wished to paint " Preoccupation," in the figure of
Isaiah, it was in the depths of his own spirit he
found the lines to express the attention of a thinker
whom nothing can distract from his meditations.
An angel calls Isaiah at the moment in which, hav-
ing placed his hand in the book of the Law, to mark
the place where he had ceased reading, the prophet

PAINTING. 79

was following the course of his own thoughts.
Scarcely moving his body, he slowly turns his head
as if even an angel's voice could not snatch him from
the abyss of reflection into which he is plunged.

The Prophets and Sibyls of Michael Angelo are
the finest examples of the higher truth of gestures or
attitudes of which Nature contains only the germ, and
which it is the province of genius to discover, in
order to create from it immortal types. The sublime
figures of Jeremiah and Daniel, of Joel and Zech-
ariah, the Erythraean, Cumaean, and Delphic Sibyls,
are true creations of this kind. Without falsifying
Nature, they are, nevertheless, supernatural. Each
of their attributes, each of their movements, relates
the drama of thought. The Sibyl of Delphi is the
proud image of the intelligence that commands; the
Cumsean seems absorbed by undecipherable enig-
mas. The Persian pores over a writing full of mys-
tery that she seems to devour. She of Lybia, hold-
ing high her book and casting down a disdainful
look, expresses contempt for the vulgar, to whom the
sibylline books were forever interdicted.

And what ideal power in the figure of Jeremiah !
The Prophet of the Lamentations is overwhelmed
with the weight of his sad presentiments ; his elbow
upon his knee, he supports with one hand his bowed
head, and closes the mouth ready to utter a groan,
while he drops the other hand with unutterable mel-
ancholy. Even his coarse and neglected drapery adds
to the expression by the simple, grand play, which

So PAINTING.

\s, as it were, the gesture of the vestments. Would
one paint, instead of the woes the prophet sees in the
future, the woes that humanity suffers in the present,
it is still in the frescoes of Michael Angelo he will
seek an example of that grand style which, far from
enfeebling attitude by generalizing it, renders it still
more striking by imprinting upon it a typical signifi-
cation. Never were consciousness of misfortune,
excess of physical dejection, and moral lassitude ex-
pressed in a more memorable manner than in the
attitude of Aza,

The point expression can attain in painting by
means of gesture, we see and marvel at in the " Last
Supper" of Leonardo da Vinci. There we recognize
what style is, and how the observation of real life,
after having germinated in the mind of a great
painter, leads him to a higher truth. He was obliged
to repeat eleven times the grievous surprise that the
announcement of betrayal was to produce in faithful
friends. He must paint astonishment, indignation,
grief, tenderness, simple loyalty, unchangeable can-
dor, all the sentiments, or rather all the variations of
sentiment, that must necessarily be evoked among
the Apostles by these words of Christ : " One of you
shall betray me." Leonardo, with that penetration
that led him to discover souls in the movements of
the body, knew how to express the individual shades
of feeling common to all the Apostles. One, aston-
ished, is already threatening the traitor; another is
cast down at the mere suggestion of such a crime ;

PAINTING. 83

this one begins to exculpate himself, that seeks the
culprit. Indignant honesty takes the form of con-
tempt or vents itself in anger. The irritable Peter
would avenge his master; John thinks only of dying
with his God.

The gestures of the " Last Supper " have been an-
alyzed with much feeling and sagacity by Stend-
hal : " St. James the Less passing his arm over the
shoulder of St. Andrew, indicates to St. Peter that
the traitor is beside him. St. Andrew looks at Judas
with horror. St. Bartholomew, who is at the end of
the table, has risen, the better to see the traitor. To
the left of Christ, St. James protests his innocence
by the gesture common to all nations — opening
his arms and offering his defenceless breast. St.
Thomas leaves his place, approaches Jesus, and, rais-
ing a finger of the right hand seems to say to the
Saviour, " One of us ? " This is one of the necessi-
ties which remind us that painting is a terrestrial
art This gesture was imperative to mark to the
eye the moment, to make understood the words just
spoken. St. Philip, the youngest of the Apostles,
by a movement full of naivete and frankness, rises
to protest his fidelity. St. Matthew repeats the
terrible words to St. Simon, who refuses to believe.
St. Thaddeus, who has first repeated them to him,
points to St. Matthew, who has heard them as well
as himself. St. Simon, the last of the Apostles, to
the right of the spectators seems to cry out, " How
dare you tell us such a horrible thing ? "

84 PAINTJNG.

Let us pass now to another order of ideas ; let us
suppose the artist occupied in painting genre pic-
tures, delineations of customs, scenes of manners, or
village fetes, as Callot delighted to represent them in
his etchings, Teniers in his paintings ; the genius of
observation will suffice, because the comic does not
exclude the ugly; on the contrary, and among popu-
lar and familiar gestures, the painter has only to
choose the most impressive. Style would here be a
perversion, for the value of the pantomime is pre-
cisely in the individual turn, in the strangeness of the
incident. Generalized, the grotesque would be cold ;
it has no savor, but when it is individualized to the
last point, seized by a photographic spirit, taken in
the act. A bohemian of Callot, a peasant of Teniers,
even an invalid of Charlet, are the more interesting
the less they resemble others. But the originals are
found only in Nature. We must have run through
the fairs with Callot or haunted the Kermesses like
Teniers, to paint, for instance, the gestures and move-
ments of a player at bowls, when, having thrown his
ball, he runs after it, follows it with his eye, encour-
ages it with voice and hand, trembles at every stone
that may hit it, and leads it to the end with a pan-
tomime that hesitates between fear and triumph
See in one of the inimitable lithographs of Charlet,
the " Call for the Contingent of the Commune," with
what skill he characterizes the gait of the young
soldier whom the discipline of the regiment has not
yet fashioned. We distinguish in the band, at the

PAINTING. 85

first glance, the skulker who is already ducking his
head to let the bullets pass by, the mourner for his
dear Falaise, the farm-boy advancing with resigna-
tion, and the scapegrace apprentice with love-lock on
his forehead, his hat over one eye, who comes whist-
ling and promising himself to get at once a bullet in
his head or win his chevrons.

Thus, the role of Nature is the more important
the lower art descends, the more familiar it grows.
Naivete is then the happiest gift ; it is even precious
in grave subjects where some features of common
life are introduced. The picture of Lesueur, in which
St. Bruno receives a letter from the Pope, shows us
a charming example of naivete in the embarrassed
countenance of the rustic envoy, who, with hand on
his cap, not knowing if it be admissible to remain
covered during the reading, seeks to read the effect
of the letter upon the countenance of the monk.

There is a great painter who has excelled in ges-
ture— Rembrandt. He did not attain the beautiful,
but he often touched the sublime. Drawing his
inspiration from the heart, he was great because he
was human, and he has thus touched the permanent
and invariable in Nature. Under the costume of the
Jews of Holland he has painted the men of all coun-
tries and all times. He understood perfectly that
gesture is optical language, the language peculiar to
painting, which ought to render the thought visible.
When Rembrandt represents a drama of the Scrip-
tures, " The Sacrifice of Abraham," for instance, with

86 PAINTING.

what genius he renders the words from Genesis,
" The Angel of the Lord called unto him out of
heaven : Abraham ! Abraham ! lay not thine hand
upon the lad." Translated in painting, the cry of the
angel becomes a decisive gesture. The messenger
of God, seizing with both hands the arms of the pa-
triarch, shows us at the same moment the beginning
and the end of the tragedy. And, since we are
speaking of gestures and attitudes, how touching is
the resignation of Isaac, who stretches out his neck
with the confidence and gentleness of the lamb about
to-be slain. Before plunging the knife into the blood
of his son, the old man covers his eyes with his hand
to spare him, at least, the sight of death. All this
pantomime is admirable, more pathetic even than
the recital of the Bible, conforming to the letter of
which so many other painters, even celebrated ones,
have drawn an angel pointing coldly and vaguely to
heaven.

The last word of art is to reconcile force of ges-
ture with beauty of movement, warmth of truth with
dignity of style. Here, Leonardo da Vinci and Ra-
phael are inimitable. Raphael, especially, had the se-
cret of intimating, by the mimicry of his figures,
more than he shows. He knows how, by the move-
ment, to indicate a part of the action that has pre-
ceded and a little of that which is to follow. What
speaking truth in the figure of Elymas struck with
blindness. The gesture seems simple, nevertheless
it is studied. Nature furnished the motive, but style

PAINTING. <>7

has revised the expression of it : " And immediately
there fell on him a mist and a darkness, and he went
about seeking some to lead him by the hand." This

THE SACRIFICE OF ABRAHAM. BY REMBRANDT.

instant Raphael has seized in a way to show us the
sudden and irresistible power of the Apostle. The
sorcerer, deprived of sight, seeks a guide, not like

88 PAINTING.

one born blind, but like a man who just now saw and
suddenly has passed from light to night. To feel
thoroughly this shade of difference, let us compare
the Elymas of Raphael with the etching of Rem-
brandt, in which the aged Tobias so well represents
the instinctive timidity and the gropings of the blind
man, accustomed to the darkness, dragging his feet
and tremblingly stretching out his hand.

Look, now, at the " School of Athens ; " in it an
attitude, a gesture, characterizes each of the philoso-
phers of antiquity. The cynicism of Diogenes is
manifested by the abandon of his posture ; the ob-
scure and discouraging doctrine of Heraclitus by his
saddened countenance ; the indifference of the Pyr-
rhonian by his quiet and ironical way of looking over
his shoulder at the young aspirant who is eagerly
writing the words he hears. The divine Plato points
with his finger to the land of the ideal, the positive
Aristotle seems, by his gesture, to moderate the enthu-
siasm of his master. Socrates, who, while reasoning,
holds with his right hand the forefinger of his left, has
the air of counting upon his fingers the deductions he
draws, one by one, from his interlocutor, Alcibiades.
In the group of pupils of Archimedes, we recognize
by their different bearing the attentive disciple who
follows the theorem of the geometrician ; the scholar,
more penetrating, who has outstripped the demon-
stration, and one who, wishing to explain it to a
fourth, finds in him only a slow intelligence, marked
by the vacuity of the countenance and the open hand
that has been able to seize nothing.

ELVMAS STRUCK WITH BLINDNESS. BY RAPHAEL.

PAINTING. 91

In the fifteenth chapter of his treatise, Leonardo
da Vinci recommends the imitation of mutes in
their pantomime, because mutes, for want of one sign,
have learned the art of supplying it by all others ;
but the fear of not being understood drives them to
excess of gesticulation, and might lead the painter to
grimaces, or, at least, to strongly marked, overloaded
mimicry. Pantomime is not only a means of making
the intention of the figures understood, it is a means
of representing them beautiful and interesting even
in their passions. The principal figure of a picture
ought rather to allow his soul to be seen than to dis-
play it. His gesture is not to demonstrate his pas-
sion but to betray it.

The painter of " Marcus Sextus " and " Clytem-
nestra," Pierre Guerin, went often to the theatre to
study his art. Thence his poetically solemn but
somewhat stilted manner. At first thought it would
seem as if the study of the tragic scene ought to
profit the painter, who aims at style, but it is not so*
The pantomime of the actor, explained by speech,
cannot be the same as that of the painter, which
speaks only to the eyes. The spectator whom the
preceding scenes have prepared, whom the dec-
lamation warms and fascinates, permits, in the hero
of the stage, exaggerated movements, whose exaggei
ation he does not even see. It is with scenic ges-
ture almost as with decoration ; both address them-
selves to the masses, for whom it is fitting to
heighten the colors and the action, because they do

92 PAINTING.

not and cannot look closely enough to appreciate the
delicacies and shadings that taste demands. On the
contrary, having before him only a cool spectator,
the painter could not make him accept anything fac-
titious or exaggerated. It is then true, that it is not
in the conventionalities of the theatre, but in the
truth of passion and of life that he must seek his first
inspiration. Why refer to the interpretations of
poetry, instead of going back to the sources of poetry
itself?

The actor and the painter have this in common —
they study individual truth the nearer they draw to
the comic. When Moliere writes the " Misan-
thrope " or " Tartufe," he generalizes, it is true, but
he produces a comedy so high it touches the tragic.
So the painter, in proportion as he elevates himself,
abandons the small truth for the great one, remem-
bering that painting, like the stage, has its sock and
buskin.

The celebrated Garrick said one day to a come-
dian who was playing the role of a drunkard, " My
friend, your head is really drunk, but your feet and
legs are perfectly sober." That is equivalent to say-
ing that unity in gesture is the law of the master and
the secret of Nature. Gratiolet has verv well said

*

(" Conferences sur la physionomie,") : " The society
of the organs of the living body is a perfect republic ;
all the organs groan at the suffering of one, all re-
joice at the joy of one — and this contagion of sen-
timent, this concert of the organs, is marvellously ex-

PAINTING. 93

pressed by the word sympathy." Nature, indeed, has
localized our organs to perfect their solidarity.
Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, divide the labor of
life, and make the analysis of the sensations whose
synthesis is in the soul. We cannot touch colors
nor see perfumes ; sound does not affect our eyes, nor
light our taste, and the smell does not tell us if the
rose is lighter than the pink ; but the sensation, once
received, is generalized, is felt through the whole
organism. Look at the figure of Laocobn ; it suffers
from head to foot — it shudders even to the toes.

Descartes observes that the soul, which always has
some influence over the muscles, has none over the
blood ; thus, pallor, or the sudden blush, do not de-
pend upon the will. This admirable remark may be
extended to certain gestures which are as involun-
tary as the movements of the blood, and escape the
empire of the soul. The painter should take note of
them, seize them in their rapid flight.

But models are not always under the eye of the
painter ; besides how fugitive are the movements that
Nature offers us. How can one imitate them if he
does not know their mechanical conditions, their
wheel-work ? The artists of antiquity, according to
all appearance, in studying gestures made use of arti-
ficial skeletons, whose limbs were put together with
screws. These jointed statuettes are described with
precision in a satire of Petronius : " While we were
drinking and admiring the magnificence of the re-
past, a slave brought a silver skeleton, made in such

94 PAINTING.

a way that its joints and vertebrae could turn in every
direction. After placing this skeleton several times
upon the table, and giving it the different postures
that the movable joints permitted, Trimalcion cried
out: ' Poor creatures ! See what we all are ! '

This passage of Petronius recalls to us the learned
and judicious Paillot de Montabert Become blind,
he loved to talk of an art that had absorbed all his
thoughts. One day, when we were talking of man-
ikins, he begged me to read him a chapter of his
" Traite de Peinture," in which he describes the
jointed and moving figures that the ancient painters
must have used, not only to compose expressive pan-
tomimes, but to represent flying or falling figures for
which no model could pose. It was in studying the
monochrome figures upon Greek vases, that the pro-
found theorist had dreamed of the manikins of cut
cards, of which he has given a drawing in his book.
We see, indeed, upon ancient pottery, bold and free
gestures, movements sometimes exaggerated even
to caricature, but always lively, resolute, speaking,
which seem to have been invented by means of
movable pieces. Is it not the imagination of the
artist, rather than Nature, which has inspired the
pantomimes of these astonishing silhouettes, and the
expressiveness of these figures of priestesses, bacchan-
tes, youths, and satyrs, that seem sometimes to be
celebrating mysteries, sometimes executing sacred
dances, or deliriously pursuing each other around
the amphora ? Moreover, is it possible that a model

PAINTING.

95

by his attitude or his gesture, could faithfuly obey
the thought, the dream of another ? How, then, sup-
ply that which Nature does not furnish more surely
than by these moving figures, which, presenting as it

MOVABLE FIGURES IN PIECES. PAILLOT DE MONTABERT.

were the algebra of the human body, are the more
suitable to formulate its postures and movements, in
the measure of the possible, and which, passing

96

PAINTING.

.

nification to the strongest te u ^

at which the gesture is energetic w

lent.

have pre-

Unguage, in Art may become

X.

WHEN THE COMPOSITION is- ONCE DECIDED UPON

• — WHEN THE GESTURES AND THE MOVEMENTS ARE
FORESEEN, THE PAINTER REFERS TO THE MODEL TO
GIVE VERISIMILITUDE TO HIS IDEAL, AND NATURAL-
NESS TO THE FORMS THAT MUST EXPRESS IT.

NATURE is a poem, but a poem obscure, of un-
fathomable depth, and of a complexity that seems to
us sublime disorder. All the germs of beauty are
contained in it, but only the human mind can dis-
cover them, set them free, and create them a second
time, by bringing them into order, proportion, and
harmony, — that is to say, unity. Nature gives us all
sounds, but man alone has invented music. She
possesses all woods and marbles ; man alone has
drawn from them architecture. She unrolls before
our eyes countries bristling with mountains and
forests, bathed by rivers, cut by torrents ; he alone
has found in them the grace of gardens. Every day
she gives birth to innumerable individuals and forms
of endless variety ; man, alone, capable of recogniz-
ing himself in this labyrinth, draws thence the ele-
ments of the ideal he has conceived, and in submit-
ting these forms to the laws of unity, he, sculptor or
painter, makes of it a work of art.

98 PAINTING.

When the lines of his composition have been con-
structed, when the gestures and movements of his
figures have been anticipated, the painter has drawn
his picture, that is, has sought expression by the char-
acter of the drawing. He must choose, in the im-
mense repertory of human forms, those best suited to
translate his emotion or his thought.

What is drawing ? Is it a pure imitation of form ?
If so, the most faithful of all drawings should be the
best ; then no copy would be preferable to the image
fixed upon the daguerreotype plate, or traced me-
chanically, or drawn by the diagraph. But neither
of these instruments gives us a drawing comparable
to that which Leonardo da Vinci or Michael Angelo
would have made. The most exact imitation, then,
after all, is not the most faithful, and the machine in
seizing the real does not always catch the true.
Why ? Because drawing is not a simple imitation, a
copy corresponding mathematically to the original
an inert reproduction, a pleonasm. Drawing is a
work of the mind, as is indicated by the orthography
of our fathers, who wrote it dessein — design. Every
drawing is the expression of a thought or a senti-
ment, and is charged to show us something superior
to the apparent truth, when that reveals no senti-
ment, no thought. But what is this superior truth ?
It is sometimes the character of the object drawn,
sometimes the character of the designer, and in high
art, is what we call style.

What do these words signify : the character of an

PAINTING. 99

object ? They signify the permanent side of its phys-
iognomy, the dominant of the impressions it can
produce. But the whole of the features that give to
objects their character, the eye alone does not seize;
it is the thought. It may be that these characters do
not appear clearly on the surface ; the painter then
makes them apparent. It may be they are changed
by some alloy ; the painter then discriminates between
inherent and foreign qualities. He unravels the
primitive truth among the accidents that have cor-
rupted it, he brings it back to harmony, unity. It is
in this sense we must interpret a phrase that Taddeo
Zuccaro attributes to Raphael: "We must paint
Nature not as she is but as she should be.

See that rock ; it is abrupt, sharp ; nevertheless if
we look at it closely, we shall notice, perhaps, smooth
parts, fissures softened and rounded ; but these ex-
ceptional features do not hinder the rock's being
rough and savage, and to render it still more rough
and savage the designer will neglect or attenuate,
voluntarily or in spite of himself, such accidental
forms, while he will amplify, if it is necessary, and
insist upon the significant forms. Thus the drawing
will have put in relief the character of the object
drawn, and far superior to the work of a machine, it
will be a work of art.

That the character of the forms should be, in the
drawing, the dominant quality, greatly superior to
mathematical exactness, is so true, that there is
nothing more interesting than the sketch of a mas-

1 00 PAINTING.

ter. I do not speak of those trifles in which the
pencil only touches a half perceived image, because
the artist is only, as Fenelon says, humming his
thought. I speak of those abridged, rapid drawings,
in which the painter, not having had leisure to be
correct, has seized only the most striking aspect of
the object and has thrown upon the paper a senti-
ment rather than an imitation, an impression rather
than a copy. How many features are wanting or are
but just indicated ! How many details are omitted !
Nevertheless this concentrated, condensed sketch has
said everything if it has made us touch with the
finger the character, veiled or prominent, that all the
forms, even the inanimate ones present, and which is
then, so to say, the spirit of things.

Again, in presence of the creations of Nature,
the artist has the privilege of seeing in them what he
himself carries in the depths of his soul, of tinting
them with the colors of his imagination, of lend-
ing them the witchery of his genius. A woman in
whom Correggio would find all the graces of volup-
tuousness, Michael Angelo would see chaste and
haughty. A landscape that to Van de Velde would
have a sweet and familiar aspect, would seem savage
to Hobbema. Claude and Poussin have both painted
the same fields, but the one discovered in them the
poetry of Virgil, the other heard more manly accents,
followed a severer muse. Thus, the temperament
of the painter modifies the character of things, and
even that of living figures ; and Nature, for him, is

PAINTING. 101

what he wills her to be. But this taking possession
is the appanage of great hearts, of great artists, those
whom we call masters ; precisely because instead of
being the slaves of reality they govern it ; instead of
obeying Nature, or rather- by reason of having known
how to obey her, they know how to command her.
These have a style; those that imitate them have
only a manner.

But aside from the style peculiar to every great
master, there is something still superior and imper-
sonal ; it is style. What we mean by this word we
have already said in the course of this work. It
is truth aggrandized, simplified, freed from all insig-
nificant details, restored to its original essence, its
typical aspect. This style, par excellence, in which,
instead of recognizing the soul of an artist, we feel
the breath of the universal soul, has been realized in
the Greek sculpture of the time of Pericles, and now
we have to examine if it be realizable in painting.
We have proven that drawing is not a mere imita-
tion of form, a literal imitation. Not that at least, for
a master.

For a master, I say, for we must distinguish be-
tween him who learns and him who knows, and turn
our attention to the teaching of drawing.

The saying of Raphael, that we have quoted, " We
must paint Nature not as she is but as she should be,"
is not addressed to pupils ; it is perfectly intelligible
only at the last degree of initiation ; and I am sure, if
it were spoken, it was only before such men as Julio

102 PAINTING.

Romano, Perino del Vaga, or Polydorus. For a be-
ginner nothing would be more misunderstood than
to counsel the ideal and to say to him, " Correct
Nature." The artist who is beginning ought to copy
naively, religiously what he sees ; but to copy Nature
it is not enough to have eyes, he must know how to
look, he must learn to see : and how shall he learn ?

Several methods may be good. There is one,
however, that Philosophy recommends ; it is that
which consists in passing from the simple to the
complex, from the permanent to the accidental, from
that which is to that which seems to be.

All bodies having three dimensions, length,
breadth, and thickness, have a form. Yet there are
those that, to the eye, have no thickness ; these have
only contour. A leaf of paper, for instance, has a
configuration determined by its exterior lines. The
figures whose fantastic silhouettes decorate Greek
vases, offer no appearance of thickness ; thus they
are not human forms but only the shadows of them.
That which we understand in painting by the word
form, is an object that has salient and reentering
parts. Hence it is impossible to draw any form
whatever without more or less of perspective ; that.,
is why Leonardo da Vinci saw in perspective, " the
universal reason of drawing." But what is perspec-
tive ? The science of apparent forms. To repre-
sent well objects as they appear, it is of consequence
to know them as they are. One cannot see truly
but with the eyes of the mind ; and a form that one

PAINTING. 103

should draw without comprehending it himself, he
could not make comprehensible to others : the igno-
rant looks, the intelligent sees.

Then, before teaching perspective, which is the
side continually accidental, it is useful to teach the
geometrical, which is for everything its real and per-
manent manner of being ; for the visual change of an
object seen foreshortened, of a capital, for instance,
is independent of the capital itself, which none the
less preserves its positive proportions, its height, its
breadth, its volume ; in other terms, its geometric con-
struction. What does the architect do before draw-
ing a building ? He traces at first the plan that
measures the depth, then the profile that determines
the height, afterwards the face that gives the breadth,
and it is when it possesses all these measures that he
draws the edifice geometrically, that is to say, as it is
in reality ; later he draws it in perspective, such as it
will be in appearance; thus should the beginner pro-
ceed. Does he wish to give the idea of a pyramid
with unequal faces ? Let him decompose the super-
ficies of it, let him know just what is the polygon
that is the base of it ; then let him draw the triangles
of which each side of the plan will be the base : let
him take account of the relations between them ;
when he shall know that the pyramid is only the
assemblage of these surfaces, he will draw it intel-
ligently.

If, on the contrary, the pupil is allowed to get in
the habit of drawing objects by approximation, with-

104 PAINTING.

out measure and rule, he will fare like a traveller
who wished to learn English, and who, scarcely
landed in Dover, hastened to repeat everything he
heard. From speaking badly in the beginning he
contracted the habit of it ; he taught himself a bad
pronunciation, which became incorrigible. If he
had for a while kept silent, he would have accus-
tomed his ear to the true pronunciation, which
would have penetrated into his mind, his memory.
But in order that it should penetrate there perfectly,
it is essential that our traveller should have seen the
language printed ; that he should know how the
words are written, of what consonants and vowels
they are formed. That is, as it were, the geometry
of the tongue, the change it undergoes in the mouth
of the people is the perspective. So to pronounce a
form well by drawing, we must first know how it is
written in the vocabulary of Nature.

To be acquainted with forms before drawing them
is a necessary condition for the beginner. He will
not know how to pencil a head correctly if he does
not know the divisions of it; still less a whole figure
if he has not learned the proportions of the skeleton
and its generic measures. And as all the lines are
straight or curved, and geometry is the principle of
all forms, it is by the elements of geometry that the
teaching of drawing should commence.

The artist, in proceeding thus, will follow the path
traced by him whom Plato calls the eternal geom-
etrician. Long before life manifested itself by that

PAINTING. 105

which is the highest expression of it, sentiment and
thought, crystallization produced a mysteriously sym-
metrical geometry, the triangular or polyhedric forms
that bodies take in passing from a liquid to a solid
state ; and the rigid lines of the prisms of minerals
preceded the reign in which the elegance of vegeta-
bles, the curves of flowers displayed themselves, and
that other reign, far higher, in which a new sym-
metry is announced, no longer rigorous, frozen, but
broken by liberty of movement, animated by life,
redeemed' by grace, or replaced by equilibrium.
The geometry that marked the beginning of this di-
vine creation of which life was the coronation, ought
also to occupy the first rank in that human creation
— art, whose last word is beauty.

All the knowledge of the designer consisting in
hollowing fictitious depths upon smooth surfaces,
and in arranging distances, the child who shall have
succeeded in putting a cube in perspective, and in
representing the convexity of a sphere, will possess,
in abridgment, the whole science of design, because
he will know how to imitate the projecting and re-
treating, and manage all that gives to forms their
modelling ; that is, light, half light, shade, reflection,
projected shadow. But a precaution is to be taken
with the young pupil ; one must not ask him to solve
two problems at once, — to catch the form he must
imitate, and at the same time to find out the manner
by which he shall translate his imitation upon paper.
To know how to read the model is not easy ; to know

106 PAINTJNG.

how to write what one has read, with the pencil
or stump, is a second difficulty added to the first.
Why should the pupil painfully invent proceedings
that others have invented before him. It seems to
us that the drawing of objects already drawn or en-
graved ought to precede drawing directly from a
model, geometrical or not ; and that before putting
one's self face to face with reality, it is well to learn
the conventional proceedings by which it is inter-
preted. For finally the contour that imprisons a
figure is made up of lines agreed upon, necessary to
fix the image upon a smooth surface. The fashion of
expressing the shadows and indicating the degrees
of distance by cuttings on the pencil or tints laid on
with the stump, are equally agreed upon. It is use-
less to complicate the embarrassments of the begin-
ner by making him study at the same time the art
of seeing and the art of interpreting. As to placing
the pupil at once in presence of the living model, it
would precipitate him into a deluge of errors and
prepare for him the bitterest discouragements, with
as little prudence and reason as to ask an aspiring
musician to decipher a symphony.

After geometry and perspective, the designer who
feels in himself the high vocation of the painter will
do well to learn the elements of architecture. Not
long since an eminent sculptor, in a very remarkable
lecture upon the teaching of drawing, said : " There
are still in the field of creation exact notions and a
sovereign art ; for if, at the beginning of our studies

PAINTING. 107

we find architecture the arsenal, as it were, of prac-
tical means, at the beginning of higher education we
shall find it contains all the principles of composi-
tion. It gives a foundation and a frame to all works
of art. It fixes picturesque ideas in stable lines ; of
necessity it fixes masses, movements, life, even senti-
ment, that it may present all in a representation that
shall be animated without causing fear, lest it should
tumble to pieces or fade away."

Is there a principle of correct drawing ? Yes, and
now we are to find ourselves with the great masters.
They will teach us that art, like science, rests upon
axioms so simple as, at first thought, to excite a
smile. " The whole is more important than a part,"
is one of the truths that serves as a rule to the de-
signer, as it is the starting point of the geometrician.
When a model poses before us, we must study the
whole, closing our eyes to details, till the general
movement of the figure has been seized. Raphael
makes us feel this predominance of synthesis even in
the parts; that is, after taking the whole of the
whole he takes the whole of each part. And this
manner of seeing which seems so natural, so simple,
we find in perfection only in the Greek sculptures of
the golden age, and in the drawings of some of the
great masters. Some illustrious artists have pro-
ceeded differently. Michael Angelo, for instance
who, instead of blending the parts into one whole,
gives them an exaggerated relief, a strongly marked
contour. Instead of enveloping the muscles, he de-

io8

PAINTING.

velops them ; but Michael Angelo is a man whom
we must admire without following, because his
genius, absolutely inimitable, inevitably leads copyists
astray. The true masters for the beginner are
Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael : the first because, in

STUDY OF RAPHAEL FOR THE APOLLO OF PARNASSUS-

spite of his love of detail, he is great by reason of
the repose and breadth of his shadows ; the second,
because he teaches grandeur without effort, and even
in a feeble copy of his drawing there is grace and

PAINTING. 109

charm, — so difficult is it to destroy the beauty of
the original.

To enable us to understand better, let us suppose
Albert Diirer drawing in the atelier of Raphael and
with him, from the model that posed for the " Apollo
of Parnassus." While the Roman artist, after hav-
ing with a few strokes seized the movement of the
model, looks at the broad surfaces and firmly indi-
cates the principal insertions of the muscles, Albert
Diirer devours with his eyes successively all parts of
the figure ; he analyzes it, copies it bit by bit. He
sees a world in each morsel, and stops to contemplate
it according to the degree of curiosity that it inspires
in him. Coming to the hand, he discovers in it an
infinity of details. He counts the veins and the
folds of the skin, and the edges of flesh around the
nails ; meanwhile, he forgets the whole, or, as a Ger-
man proverb says, the trees prevent his seeing the
forest; so that if the figure stands well upon its feet,
if the general movement is correct or seems to be,
it will be through a miracle, or because the Teutonic
genius with infinite patience will several times have
corrected its work. From this search for detail
there will result something unequal, disagreeable,
and stiff in the drawing and in the entire figure ; an
individuality not consonant with grandeur and style.
Finally, the model we have supposed posing before
Raphael and Albert Diirer will remain, in the work
of one, a peasant of the Campagna, while the painter
of Urbino will only have to suppress some peculiar-

1 10 PAINTING.

ities to ennoble his subject, and soon mounting to
Parnassus, the fiddler of the Sabine hills will lead
the choir of the Muses, as the god of Poesy.

But a question presents itself now which is per-
haps the most delicate, most difficult, and important
that we have to examine. Is style in painting of the
same quality as in sculpture ?

Sculpture, as we have already said, demands
beauty above everything. It seeks, among the
countless examples of human and animal life, those
that represent a collective variety, a whole family of
beings. Its mission is to fix types. It does not
imitate the features of a certain strong and generous
man ; it sculptures the generous strength we call
Hercules. It does not model the image of .such or
such a handsome young man ; it models the accom-
plished gymnast, the elegant and supple, the robust
and light-footed adolescent — Mercury, the embodi-
ment of manly youth and grace. To the sculptor
we may apply the verses of an unknown poet upon
an ancient painter : —

" En rassemblant ces traits, le sculpteur transport^,
Ne forme aucune belle ; il forme la beauteV'

It is not precisely the same thing for the painter
Doubtless he can sometimes lift himself to the
majesty of symbolic art, and thus draw near to
sculpture by the purity of forms, choice of attitude,
and significance of drapery ; but he runs the risk of
having the apparent coldness of marble, without its

PAINTING. 1 1 1

grand fullness, its imposing relief. There is, be-
sides, in painting, an essential element which does
not readily lend itself to emblematic expressions, —
that is, color. Unless he keep to the severity of
monochrome, and put unity in place of harmony,
the artist using color will particularize what he
wishes to generalize, and will contradict his own
grandeur. Color can be an allusion to the idea only
upon condition of being one. In its variety, charm-
ing or pathetic, gay or sombre, it expresses only the
variable shades of sentiment or sensation.

The painter then is more closely bound to real life
than the sculptor, that is to say, to movement and to
change. He is nearer nature, his figures are charac-
ters rather than symbols, men than gods," and gener-
ally his mission is to represent them to us in the
medium in which they move, in the atmosphere they
breathe, interesting through chosen individuality, col-
ored by light, framed in by the landscape, clothed in
a costume that indicates their nationality, surrounded
by circumstances that determine their action. The
painter contents himself with being expressive where
the sculptor would be beautiful ; he so subordinates
physical beauty to moral physiognomy that he does
not even reject ugliness.

This conception of art distinguished the great
Florentines of the fifteenth century, — Masaccio,
Filippino Lippi, Donatello, and above all, Leonardo
da Vinci. Persuaded that style in painting has its
roots in the depths of nature, and that every human

1 1 2 PAINTING.

figure holds a hidden fire from which a spark may
burst under the eye of the artist, this great man
sought out living caricatures and copied them with
an inexorable fidelity, hoping to discover, in the
excess of ugliness, the exaggeration of a character
that he could afterwards bring back to human con-
ditions, by suppressing the deformity, and preserv-
ing the expressiveness. When he was painting that
sublime picture, the " Last Supper," he was daily seen
going through the markets and faubourgs of Milan,
to catch those grotesque or frightful visages which in
his eyes denoted only a want of equilibrium between
the conception and the birth, between the idea and
the form, as if blind Nature, in the obscurity of a
dream, had lost the measure of her creations and
produced only nightmares. But these caricatures
aided him to find the germ of a character. He
purified, he polished the monster, till he had suc-
ceeded in seizing, in spite of the deviations produced
by mysterious accidents, the germ of a physiognomy
profoundly characteristic, and again made beautiful
while remaining energetic. The admirable heads of
the Apostles in the "Last Supper" have been thus
disengaged from certain uglinesses observed in the
lowest walks of life. In the hands of the artist,
guided by such a master, a bit of coal becomes a
diamond.

We are no longer in the age in which the painter,
making of every figure an idea, as in ancient Egypt,
suppressed individuals by giving them only the

PAINTING. I 1 3

physiognomy of their caste. Warriors, heroes, Pha-
raohs, gods, priests, slaves, all were there to indicate
their species, not to assert their individuality. Each
figure is an emblem, each slave represents thousands
of slaves, each priest the entire class of priests, so
that there is not a figure in this strange painting
that is not multiplied to the eyes of the mind by all
its similars, and which does not appear like a number.
On the walls of the temple defile processions of ideas
represented by phantoms always the same, always
regulated by a sacerdotal rhythm. Individual vari-
eties disappear under the uniformity of the symbol ;
all personality is effaced, and men are only the letters
of a written enigma. Yes, we are far, very far from
that solemn art in which the artist, commanded by
religion, immolated Nature to the secret ideal of the
sanctuary. Neither can we rejuvenate the painting
of the Greeks, so similar, apparently, to their sculp-
ture. Enfranchised henceforth from hieratic forms,
we demand of our painters living children. We in-
sist that they shall separate what antiquity con-
founded ; that they shall put in relief personal char
acteristics, which the ancients disdained.

Study the model ! who dare dispense with it
when we know that Raphael restricted himself to
it all his life. What a priceless lesson we have
in his drawings from Nature. There is so much
naivete they seem the result of intuitive knowledge.
We are in the atelier of the master. There is a girl
of the people, a young woman from Trastevere, to

114 PAINTING.

serve as a model for the " Holy Family," that be-
came so famous, — the Virgin of Francis First, now
in the Louvre. Dressed in a simple tunic, her hair
negligently arranged, the young woman, the knee
bent, the leg naked, bends forward as if to lift up a
child that, as yet, exists only in the thought of the
painter. In this attitude she poses under the eye
of Raphael, who, desiring truth more than beauty,
arrests the movement of the figure, assures himself
of the proportions, seizes the play of the muscles,
and verifies the grace of his thought. But he has
only gone over a third of his road. The same
woman will pose again, clothed and draped, except
the left arm that will remain naked, and will after-
wards be drawn by itself covered with a sleeve.
What precautions, what scruples, what religious love
of Art ! At the age of thirty-five, and at the apogee
of his genius, Raphael studies twice a figure for
the Virgin, draws at first nude that which was to be
enveloped in drapery, and afterwards the drapery
that was to envelop the nude. But he knew them
by heart, these Virgins with the child Jesus, who
drew themselves under his facile pen, sketching a
smile and from the first lines letting us divine their
future grace. But it was necessary the painter
should see them first upon earth, when they were
simple girls of the people, who had not yet been
visited by the angel and divinized by style. Thus
when this transfigured model shall be a Madonna,
when the child shall spring into the arms of his

PAINTING.

mother, and seraphs shall come to throw flowers
upon his cradle, the painting of Raphael will pre-
serve something natural and secretly familiar that
will render it more touching, because before being

STUDY OF RAPHAEL, FOR THE VIRGIN OF FRANCIS FIRST.

the picture of a divine family it was the image of a
human family. We see now what the role of the
draughtsman is. I mean one who is no longer a

n6

PAINTING.

pupil, who has become a master. The model must
serve, not subjugate him. When a woman, a man,

THE VIRGIN OF FRANCIS FIRST. LOUVRE.

a graybeard, a child, poses before him, he has an
idea, an aim. He wishes to express a drama, an
action, a poetry, as the great Titian said (vi mando

PAINTING. 117

la poesia di Venere). Let us suppose the heroine
of his future picture, antique or modern, is a be-
loved Stratonice or a loving Marguerite, is it pos-
sible to imagine that the first comer will know how
to take suitable attitudes, above all, that she will
possess the enchanting beauty that explains the love
of an Antiochus, or the naive graces that justify the
celebrity of the Germanic poem and the tenderness
of all Germany for the beloved of Faust ? That if
the artist proposes to paint a blind Homer who, fol-
lowing his guide upon the highway, sings his im-
mortal rhapsodies, it will suffice to copy the old
beggar who just asked alms of him ? Look at this
drawing of Filippino Lippi, made from nature for a
Saint Michael : how many things he will modify, how
many ignore altogether, in order to transfigure this
man picked up in the street into an archangel. It
is clear that here the living model is only a neces-
sary instruction, a reference. But if all the words
of the language are in the dictionary, eloquence is
only in the soul of the writer ; and if all truths are in
nature, it is that the painter may draw thence the
elements of expression, not by composing his figures
of bits and morsels, but by bringing them back to
the unity of the character he has conceived, by in-
suring the triumph of the sentiment that animates
him, imitating the musician who hastens or retards
the time according to his own heart-beats.

Nothing is rarer than fine models, especially in
France, where the mingling of races has effaced the

n8

PAINTING.

primordial accent of creation. The fresh beauty or
the integrity of primitive characters is scarcely
found except among people that have not mixed
their blood with that of others, like the mountaineers

STL'DY OF FILIPPINO LIPPI FOR A ST. MICHAEL.

of Savoy and Albania, the Circassians, Ethiopians,
Negroes. One who has visited the ateliers of our
painters knows how defective are the models. Ordi-
narily they are degenerate beings, without the least
culture, who have been induced by poverty to exhibit

PAINTING. 119

their hirsute or swollen forms, their pitiful gait, their
unfortunate proportions void of unity. How many
times, in the atelier of Paul Delaroche, have we seen
models of men and women, selected for certain par-
tial beauties, present nevertheless the grossest faults,
huge excrescences, thin muscles, unwholesome flesh,
vague and insignificant features.

It is noticeable that all the schools of the deca-
dence have introduced into painting the common-
place features of the model, that is, those uglinesses
that can neither be redeemed by character nor
transfigured by sentiment. Pietro da Cartona, Gior-
dano, Sdlimena, Vanloo, Restout, Natoire, Boucher,
have reproduced and overloaded similar vulgarities.
Hence those common heads, misshapen arms, de-
formed feet, which recall what we have seen in the
streets or among the bathers at the sea-shore. The
characters of Nature never reappear in their original
purity, their striking unity. For them a Diana, a
Juno, are courtesans with flabby flesh, whose nudity
displays ugly folds, dimples that seem strangled in
wadding, and if in their pictures we recognize the
presence of Nature it is only by her errors, — her
vagaries.

We may then say without paradox that nothing
is farther from truth than such realism, for, instead
of being natural, every deformity is contrary to Na-
ture, since it is a falsification of eternal laws, and a
corruption of divine exemplars. On the contrary,
there are no figures in the world truer than the Ilissus

1 20 PAINTING.

and the Theseus. Can we believe they were taken
from life ? Has Nature ever brought forth individ-
uals as beautiful as those statues ? Why, then, in
their incomparable perfection, are they apparently so
true a truth, — so naive ? It is because Phidias caught
the spirit of creation, found again the essence of
forms, and that nothing can be truer than the essence
of truth. Great artists take Nature for their model,
but they do not take a model for Nature.

XL

AFTER HAVING VERIFIED THE FORMS HE HAS CHO-
SEN, THE ARTIST FINISHES, BY LIGHT AND COLOR, THE
MORAL EXPRESSION AND THE OPTICAL BEAUTY OF HIS
THOUGHT.

Now we reach painting properly so called, we
enter its true domain. Till now the thought of the
artist has remained, as it were, covered with a veil.
We can imagine his composition, if it is but a sketch,
like a bas-relief, which would hardly be visible in the
darkness of the atelier. But let an open window ad-
mit the sunlight, and at once the relief transforms
itself into a picture, in which distances may be infi-
nitely multiplied, and that the perspective will hol-
low by causing the disappearance of the level surface
that served as a foundation to the relief, which will
be replaced by a sky, a landscape, the walls of a
magnificent palace, or the interior of a cabin.

Daughter of light, Painting creates in its turn a
light of her own, and in imitating the luminous ef-
fects she has observed in Nature, she carries in her-
self the elements of her clearness and her obscurity.
It is not with the painter as with the architect or the
sculptor, whose palpable creations are subjected to

122 PAINTJNG.

the mobile and changing power of natural life. A
monument that appears simple and grand by moon-
light may lose these qualities in the light of day, if
it is loaded with details and dwarfed by superfluous
ornaments which were lost sight of in the uncertain
light of the moon. A piece of sculpture expressive,
almost tragic, like the " Pensieroso " of Michael
Angelo, might change its character if its place were
changed, and if, instead of being lighted from above,
it received its light from below, which would disperse
the profoundly melancholy shadows that envelop the
face of the hero. On the contrary, the painter draws
his light from his color-box, and even if it should
please him to use only different shades of the same
color, he is free to distribute upon his work light and
shadow with this color alone, provided he conform
to optical law. It is the sun, it is true, that lights
up the canvas of the painter, but it is the painter
himself who lights up his picture. In representing
in it, according to his pleasure, the appearances of
light and shadow he has chosen, he throws upon it a
ray of his own spirit.

Free thus to illuminate his drama in a way that
shall be invariable, he need not fear lest the external
light should ever come to contradict the sentiment
which has inspired him, and this liberty is precisely
that which allows him to heighten the expression by
the management of lights and shadows, the chiaro
'scuro. Although this expression is sometimes em-
ployed by painters to designate a crepuscular tone,

PAINTING. 123

which holds the middle place between light and dark-
ness, we must understand by chiaro-'scuro the essen-
tial part of painting — the art of illuminating it.

We have compared the drawn sketch of the
painter to a monochrome bas-relief. Let us sup-
pose now that this bas-relief has ceased to be
one of marble; that it is composed of divers sub-
stances ; that certain personages in it are clothed
in light drapery in the shadow, and in the light in
sombre drapery; that among the figures some are
sunburned or black ; that there are mingled in
the composition some trees with brown foliage and
others with pale leaves ; see how the chiaro 'scuro is
modified by the amount of black and white which
the divers elements of the picture bring into it. The
light, in meeting surfaces that absorb it, and those
that reflect it, has changed the effect of the drawing
and varied its aspect, without, however, destroying,
in its mass, the great part of chiaro "scuro that the
painter had at first taken. These variations, intro-
duced into the fine harmony of the drawing, by notes
higher or lower, are what we call values; that is the
degree of elevation, the effect of tone relatively to
neighboring tones. The value of an object then, in
painting, is the degree of force with which it reflects
light. In the chiaro 'scuro of a picture, represent-
ing, for instance, a group of fruits, an orange would
have less value than a lemon, because orange-color is
less luminous than yellow. Thus, all the visible ob-

1 24 PAINTING.

jects of Nature possess a degree of light which as-
signs them a place in the gamut of chiaro 'scuro, and
gives them a value that is called their tone. This
word, derived from the Greek r6vo$ signifies tension,
vigor, expresses the sum of the luminous intensity, is
synonymous with value.

We must then distinguish the tone from the &»/,
that is to say, from the color, although these two
terms, tone and tint, because of their close relation-
ship, are often employed the one for the other.
Strictly speaking, the tone is independent of the tint
and may be separated from it. The engraver, when
he translates upon copper the colors of a picture, does
nothing but separate the tone from the tint. Nature
herself shows us every instant substances that have
not the same tone although they have the same
color. Lilac, for' instance, which resembles violet
in color, differs from it in tone, since lilac is a light
violet, violet a dark lilac. Reciprocally, two objects
may present the same tones and different tints.
Thus, when the sky is darkened at the horizon and
becomes of a bluish gray, it often happens that the
foliage of a tree still lighted up by the sun, and
which just now stood out boldly upon the horizon,
becomes almost of the same tone as the sky, so that
the painter can scarcely discern if the sky has more
value than the tree, or if it is the light green of the
tree which has more than the blue gray of the sky.

This distinction between tone and tint, between
value and color, leads us to distinguish 'between

PAINTING. 125

chiaro 'scuro and coloring ; the first individualizes
objects by relief, the second individualizes them by
color. So long as the picture remains monochrome,
it is far from having uttered its last word. It must
still translate values into colors, clothe with countless
shades of color forms which, in the economy of light
and shade, play similar roles ; finally must replace the
white light which detaches figures from one another,
by the colored light, which, enriching them with its
tints, will render its illusion more lively, its mirage
more charming.

XII.

CHIARO 'SCURO, WHOSE OBJECT is NOT ONLY TO PUT

FORMS IN RELIEF, BUT TO CONVEY THE SENTIMENT
THE PAINTER WISHES TO EXPRESS, IS SUBJECT TO THE
REQUIREMENTS OF MORAL BEAUTY AS WELL AS THE
LAWS OF NATURAL TRUTH.

FROM the little we know of ancient painting, and
the little that remains to us of it, we may believe that
light and shadow became a means of expression only
in modern times. Under the influence of sculpture,
which among the Greeks was the dominant art, their
painting employed light and shade only for the im-
itation of projecting and reentering parts of the
figure. Philostratus, describing a figure of Venus,
said the goddess was going out of the picture as
if she wished to be pursued, and Pliny relates that
in the picture of Alexander as "Jupiter Tonans,"
painted by Apelles, the ringers holding the thunder-
bolt seemed beyond the canvas. But it is hot prob-
able that Greek painting used the poetry of light
and shadow to enhance the interest of the action
represented. Modeled one by one in the open air,
the figures of the Greek picture were, according to
all appearance, placed together like those of a bas-
relief; they did not form a whole having a significa-

PAINTING. 127

don through the charm of mystery or the triumph of
brilliancy. It seems as if no trouble obscured the
serene souls of the ancient painters and that they
never suspected the expression of shadow. But after
the long sadnesses of Christianity, humanity would
one day awake with sentiments that antiquity never
knew, or at least that it has not manifested in its art ;
melancholy, vague disquietude, the torments of su-
perstition, all the shadows of the heart. When
Greece rose again in Italy, when Athens called her-
self Florence, the ancient light reappeared, but
through the veil of the sombre Middle Ages ; then the
first of the great modern geniuses, Leonardo da
Vinci, brought into painting a new light, and, finding
the eloquence of the shadow, made it apparent that
chiaro 'scuro could express the depths of reverie as
well as those of space, and, with all the reliefs of the
body, all the emotions of the soul.

The moderns, not content with modeling sepa-
rately each figure, have invented the modeling of the
Picture, that is to say, the treating it in its turn as a
single figure, as a single whole, having its broad
parts of clear, of brown, and of half-tints. Titian
justly, and like the master he was, compared the
chiaro 'scuro of a picture well lighted up by the
painter, to the effect of a bunch of grapes, of which
each particular grape offers on the side of the light,
its light, its shadow, and its reflection, while all
the grapes taken together present only a single large
mass of light sustained by a broad mass of shadow.

128 PAINTING.

This comparison leads us to the principle that governs
the theory of light and shadow. This principle is
unity ; that is the harmony of the representation to
the eye, and the harmony of the expression to the
thought, and in addition, the accord demanded by
sentiment between these two harmonies.

How much higher art is than nature when it
moves in its own domain — the beautiful. A tem-
pest may burst upon the ocean in full daylight, even
when the sun is shining brightly ; what artist would
paint it without making the sky overcast, without
adding the horror of the darkest clouds and the
menaces of night ? Is it not an expressive role that
chiaro 'scuro plays in the " Shipwreck of the Med-
usa," traversed by that cold, pale light which glides
over the dying and the dead, while on the far-oft hor-
izon a ray of hope furrows the sea ? Oftentimes it
happens that the sun shines upon catastrophes of
which it is ignorant. Should the painter imitate this
sublime indifference when he needs all the accumu-
lated resources of his art to move the soul ? " You
are far behind your age," said a philosopher to an
artist, " if you think it is without interest to know
what the weather was in Rome the day Caesar was
assassinated." The opposite of nature, which dis-
tributes by" chance her poesies in the infinite ,of time
and space, painting has only a very limited space,
only a brief moment in which to move us. Hence
the laws of unity are imposed upon her, not as a
shackle, but as a sure means of redoubling her en-
ergy, her power.

PAINTING. 1 29

The choice of his light must be left to the will of
the painter, but what treasures are contained in this
liberty, what variety it promises. Let us run through
the history of painters, or rather let us wander
through the Gallery of the Louvre : we shall see
that each of the great masters of painting has his
chosen light, his favorite hour, his torch. Leonardo
da Vinci preferred for his picture, as women do for
their beauty, the tempered light of the lamp, or the
twilight. It pleases him to play the music of chiaro
'scuro in a minor key and to let the sweet mystery of
a veil fall over his most brilliant conceptions, as in
that head of Mona Lisa, whose look fascinates us
behind the wealth of poetry that seems interposed
between her and us. " The face," he says, "acquires
a singular grace and beauty by the blending of light
and shadow. We see examples of it in persons
seated at the doorway of a dark house and lighted up
by a ray of the setting sun."

Rubens, the painter of external magnificence and
show, opening wide all his windows to the sun, will
dare to imitate its splendors. Rembrandt, on the
contrary, a dreamy soul, an interior man, chooses a
dark atelier into which he allows only a veiled light
to penetrate. The commonplace light of day dis-
pleases, vexes him, he lives at ease only in the inner
world of his thoughts, in the infinite melancholy and
depth of his half-tints, produced by fantastic rather
than natural light. He is lavish of shadows, he rep-
resents the stage of life as a half-obscure retreat, and

1 30 PAINTING.

if the sun lights it up for an instant it will soon grow
pale and lose itself in the harmonious silence in
which it espouses the night.

An amorous and sad poet, Prud'hon, betrays his
preference for softened shadows and pale lights.
By the light of the moon he shows the grace of his
elegy and the bitter pleasures of his grief; by her
rays he paints his most horrible tragedies, the death
of Abel and the death of Christ.

Others, like Elsheimer, Leonard Bramer, Hon-
thorst devote themselves to the imitation of artificial
light ; they look at nature only by the light of
torches, they love black night and they seek, in tra-
dition, all subjects, all dramas whose terror may be
redoubled by obscurity, for there is something pa-
thetic in the shadows when they weigh down grief.
Finally, there are found even in the bosom of our
bright and well-balanced French school, fantastic
geniuses, smitten with a love of extraordinary things,
who have illumined their pictures, or rather their vis-
ions, with phosphorescent lights, and in our own days,
Girodet, inspired by the poetry of Ossian, has evoked
the shades of French soldiers in the palaces inhab-
ited by the phantoms of Fingal and his followers,
and has presented there the great generals of the
Republic, Marceau, Kleber, Hoche, Desaix, Jour-
dan, and Dugommier, who, borne upon meteors, tear
with their spurs the shining fogs of the Scandina-
vian Olympus.

But the liberty of the painter is still more extended.

PAINTING. 131

for, when he has chosen his medium of lighting, he
can suppose it narrow or wide, diffuse or concen-
trated, animated or cold. He can also direct the
lines of light so as to heighten visible beauty, and in
accordance with the sentiment his painting ought to
express.

If he wishes to produce a startling effect and give
the spectator the idea of an energetic relief, he will
narrow the opening by which the light enters, and
let it fall upon certain sides of the picture whose pro-
jection is then enhanced by well-defined shadows.
He thus obtains positive distances, plainly marked
after the manner of Caravaggio, Ribera, Valentin, at
the risk of falling, like these masters, into the opaque-
ness of black, and of taking from the flesh-tints their
natural aspect by giving them the appearance of
plaster, or of leather yellow and hard, that does not
allow either the color or the circulation of the blood
to appear.

If he wishes to represent scenes that must
have passed in the open air, he will, like Veronese
and Rubens, choose a broad abundant light, of a
nature to procure bright, gay masses sufficiently
sustained by half-obscure backgrounds. It is not
only to brilliant and pompous spectacles, like
the " Marriage at Cana " or the " Coronation of
Marie de Medicis," that a diffused and generous
light is befitting, it suits any vast composition,
whether destined to decorate a wall or to form a pic-
ture by itself, which would be intolerable if sad,

1 32 PAINTING.

stifled by the extent of its shadows, especially if these
were strongly marked. It is not probable that large
spaces would be illuminated by a prison light. Leo-
nardo da Vinci says: " Universal light gives more
grace to figures than a particular and small light,
because broad and powerful lights surround and
embrace the relief of bodies, so that the works they
light up unfold themselves from a distance and with
grace, while those that have been painted under a
narrow luminary take an immense amount of shad-
ow, and at a distance seem like a flat painting."

From this apt observation it results that easel pic-
tures are the only ones in which one can be sparing
of light, because the spectator, before looking at them
near at hand, discovers in them depths which at a
distance would resolve themselves into a mass of
black. Those who have visited the Museum of the
Louvre have noticed two small pictures of Rem-
brandt — the " Philosophers." Each represents an
old man meditating, in a subterranean chamber that
receives, by a sort of air hole, a little light, which
with difficulty traverses the dust-covered glass, oozes
along the walls, crawls on the ground, vaguely indi-
cates the form of the old man and loses itself in the
night of the cavern. It is impossible to express bet-
ter by the magic alone of light and shadow the tran-
quil melancholy and the silence of a solitary reverie.
If we suppose Rembrandt to have painted his " Phi-
losophers " life size, upon a canvas five or six yards
long, we shall feel at once that these shadowy masses

PAINTING. 133

would have lost all poetry and we should have two
monstrous, almost ridiculous pictures, instead of the
two diamonds of sombre painting. Rembrandt, it is
true, in his famous " Night Watch," which is a large
canvas, has given much extent and importance to his
shadows ; but he has taken care not to fall into the
ink-tones of Caravaggio and Ribera, and his shadows,
although embrowned by time, still preserve a beauti-
ful transparency; they are, as it were, steeped in a
light that slumbers in mystery like a secret and far-
off reminiscence of the sun.

What shall be the angle of incidence of the chosen
light? Shall it come from above, from below, or
from the side ? Shall we suppose it placed opposite
the picture or behind it ?

Winckelmann, in his "Remarks upon the Architec-
ture of the Ancients," relates that the young girls of
Rome, after they have been promised in marriage, are
seen by their lovers for the first time in public, in the
Rotunda of the Pantheon, because the light enters
there by a single opening in the roof, and the light
from above is most favorable to beauty. Women
here are the best judges and from their decision
there is no appeal. Man being the only one among
living beings, to whom the upright attitude is natu-
ral, it is fitting he should receive the light from
above, as this enhances all the graces of the human
figure, of which height is the dominant dimension.
The contrary is true of the scenes of nature. The
mountains, the hills, the trees, the rivers, the ravines

1 34 PAJNTING.

and the other accidents of the landscape, lose a part
of their character and their form when lighted per-
pendicularly. Thus, a field is never more interest-
ing for a landscapist than when it is traversed ob-
liquely, almost horizontally, by the rays of the rising
or the setting sun.

In a gallery whose openings are made on the slope
of the roof, statues produce the most agreeable effect
and have the most dignity. A sheet of light extend-
ing itself over the breast enlarges it visibly, effaces the
lower part of the ribs, lessens the projection of the
abdomen, but it is the human head above all which
under the light from above reveals all its beauties.
The eyebrows become more prominent, the eyes
more brilliant under the dark cavity hollowed by the
arch of the brows, the cheek-bones slightly raised, the
nose simplified and lengthened, marked by a lumi-
nous line that supports the shadow thrown where
the black of the nostrils is softened and lost. Finally,
unless it is absolutely perpendicular, the ray lights
up the lower lip, models the chin, and leaving in
shadow the setting of the neck, forms of it a dark
column that supports the clear mass of the face.

Let the light come from below, all this beautiful
order is overthrown. Who is not vexed to see the
actresses of our theatres disfigure themselves by the
glare of the foot-lights ? How often is the play of
the features falsified by this unnatural lighting, which
casting a shadow upward from the cheek-bones, lends
the face an equivocal expression of sorrow or malice.

PAINTING. 135

It is noticeable that the monuments of antiquity
cease to have all their significance when lighted hor-
izontally, still more if from below, because the pro-
files of the capitals, the window-casings, the cornices,
have been constructed with reference to the falling
of water from the sky and the perpendicularity of the
light, and the architect foresaw their shadow below,
not above. Upon the monuments, as upon the hu-
man face, if the light strike full in front and in a way
to swallow up the shadows, it flattens what it ought
to put in relief. But if it come from the side or from
behind, so that objects are more or less interposed be-
tween the light and the spectator, it may furnish
piquant and unexpected effects, whose employment is
not forbidden by good taste, if it is not by verisimil-
itude. Unfortunately these singularities always excite
a mania for imitation. We remember a time in which
certain romanticists, running after a facile originality,
multiplied pictures lighted from below, and encircling
with a luminous band figures sometimes transparent,
sometimes dark, made them resemble living lanterns
or mulattoes with snow on their shoulders.

Leonardo da Vinci says we should place a light
background in contrast to a shadow and a dark
background to a mass of lisfht, and it is a gfeneral

o o o

principle, a precept not to be attacked. There are
colorists, however, who have thought to enhance the
harmony of their pictures by uniting the brown of
their figures to those of the background, and by
accompanying the half-lights of the background with

1 36 PAINTING,

the full light of the figures. But those are secrets
beyond elementary instruction. He who possessed
them in fullest measure was Correggio. He has
drawn from them a voluptuous sweetness, which
caresses the eye, softens the air, amplifies nature, un-
bends the mind, and adds a sentiment of happiness
to the spectacles of life. When he has placed in his
picture a broad, dominant light, he takes care to fol-
low it by a half-tint ; and if he wishes to return to a
brilliant light in a smaller space, he does not pass at
once to the degree of tone he had left, but leads our
eyes to it by insensible steps, so that the sight of the
spectator, according to the observation of Mengs, is
awakened as a sleeper is drawn from slumber by the
sound of an agreeable instrument, an awakening that
resembles enchantment rather than interrupted repose.
"During my sojourn in Venice," said Sir Joshua
Reynolds, " I employed the following method to util-
ize the principles of the Venetian masters. When I
noticed an extraordinary effect of light and shadow in
one of their pictures, I took a leaf from my note-book,
covered all parts of it with black pencil marks, ob-
serving the same order and the same shading as in
the picture, letting the white paper represent the
light. After a few trials I found the paper was al-
ways covered with nearly similar masses. It seemed
to me, finally, that the general practice of these mas-
ters was to give no more than a quarter of the pic-
ture to the light, including the principal and second-
ary lights, another quarter to shadow, and to reserve
the rest for the half-tints.

PAINTING. 137

Holding a paper thus pencilled in masses at some
distance from the eye one will be surprised at the
manner in which it will strike him ; he will expe-
rience the pleasure that an excellent distribution of
light and shadow causes, although he may not dis-
cern if what he sees be a historical subject, a land-
scape, a portrait, or a representation of still-life, for
the same principles cover all branches of art."

That the mass of half-tints should occupy half the
space to be covered, that the light and shadow should
divide the other half is a happy solution and desirable
as a satisfaction to the eye. Following the example
of the Venetians, and upon the faith of an eminent
painter, who was also a man of superior intelligence,
we may adopt it. It needed nothing less than the
genius of Rembrandt to change these relations and to
limit the field of light to an eighth of the space. He
who thinks only of pleasing the eye could not in-
dulge in such economy of light, he must pay too
dearly for the piquancy of the effect. But Rem-
brandt, who always addressed the eyes of the soul,
could darken his picture to enhance its moral ex-
pression and sacrifice- the external gaiety of the spec-
tacle to the profounder poetry of the thought. In
the absence of such poetry the abundance of black
would only sadden and discourage the beholder.

Bolder than the Venetians, and animated by a
genius the opposite of that of Rembrandt, Rubens,
in his pictures, has assigned to the light about a
third of the surface to be covered. Hence that mag-

1 38 PAINTING.

nificence, that seductive pomp, bright and facile,
which so enchants us we desire to see the scenes he
has represented, to plunge in the waters in which his
Nereids bathe, to walk in the palaces he has built for
his heroes, and which are open to his gods. But in
pictures so generously illuminated, the effect must be
sustained by the variety and quality of the colors.
The brilliancy Rubens has attained does not depend
upon the vigor of dark masses, but upon this, he has
exalted his light without giving more energy to his
shadows. It was of Rubens Montabert was thinking
when in his " Traite de Peinture " he says : " Every
day we admire the dazzling flesh-tints of certain chil-
dren upon whom the light falls in a striking manner
in the streets, in the open air, in full sunlight; this
brilliant light does not throw on their fresh heads
any dark, heavy shadow; all is clear, rounded, and in
strong relief, all is tender and fresh, yet nothing too
soft, too undecided. To imitate such effects the
painter must double the brilliancy of his light and
not increase the depth of his shadows."

Whatever may be the division of light and
shade, its optical beauty is under the sovereign
law of unity. That is to say, the picture must not
offer two light masses of equal intensity, nor two
dark masses of equal vigor. The sure means of
destroying the effect of a light or the value of a
shade, is to assimilate to it a second luminous or
dark mass. It is moreover evident that to interest,
every picturesque spectacle ought to present one

PAINTING. 1 39

dominant point of light in the mass of light, and
one dominant dark point in the mass of shade,
without which the attention is divided, the uncertain
look is wearied, the interest lost. Look, for instance,
at a bust portrait of Rubens or Van Dyck, if the
figure is dressed in black and wears a hat, the dark
mass of the hat will be less in volume than that of
the coat, if the two browns should balance each other
in size, the portrait would be intolerable, the equi-
librium of the whole destroyed by the equilibrium of
the blacks. If the model wears his own hair, his
head will form the dominant light, and if a hand is
visible, it will not be so light as the face ; if the hand
hold a glove, that hand and glove may not form a
mass equal to the head in size, the glove should be
represented of chamois leather, of a neutral tint, like
those of Titian and Velasquez ; or should be soiled
that the second light may not be so prominent as the
first.

By " the unity of chiaro 'scuro " we must under-
stand, there will be one principal mass of light, one
dominant mass of brown, because all rivalry would
produce a conflict of equivalent forces that would
disconcert the eyes and hold in suspense the desired
impression. In the picture, as in nature, the light
ought to be one, but not unique. When the sun illu-
minates creation, its rays mirrored by the waters, re-
flected by the clouds, themselves call forth secondary
lights which enhance the brilliancy of the orb and
form a cortege for his triumph. So, after sunset, the

140 PAINTING.

planets, at the infinite distance at which we perceive
them in the firmament, shine like luminous points
that modestly accompany the torch of night, and
augment its lustre by their far-off scintillations.

For the moral expression of the picture two foci of
light, of which one is subordinate to the other, some
times produce a touching and marvelous effect. A
proof that light and shade have as much affinity with
the soul as with the sight, is that the French, guided
by the mind rather than by temperament, are of all
painters, Rembrandt excepted, those who have best
understood the eloquence of chiaro 'scuro. How
beautiful we should think the " Clytemnestre " of
Guerin, were it the work of a foreign artist! What
fascination in the light of the lamp that falls upon
the sleeping Agamemnon, and which, intercepted by
a purple curtain, has already taken the hue of blood!
What a touching contrast between the two figures of
Egistheus and Clytemnestra, the fever of their crime
in that sinister half-tint, and the profound peace of
the sleeping hero, represented to the eye by the quiet
moonlight shining upon an inner court of the palace
of Argos. ... It is remarkable that a School that is
thought to disdain the resources of chiaro 'scuro and
of color, has produced the sleeping " Endymion," ca-
ressed by the rays of an invisible goddess, that Prud-
'hon never wearied of admiring, and the " Virgil
reading the ALneid" in which Granet has found an
effect so tragic in the image of Marcellus rising like a
spectre evoked by the poet and projecting upon the

PAINTING. 141

fe

wall a shadow, colossal and indistinct, the shadow of
a phantom.

But we must confess it was reserved for Rembrandt
to fathom the mysteries of chiaro-'scuro. "He is
the clair-obscuriste par excellence" said David to his
pupil, Auguste Couder. In truth, how many things
he has expressed by the play of light and shadow,
this great painter of foggy Holland, whether he rep-
resents Christ resuscitating Lazarus, by causing the
light of life to shine in the tomb, or appearing to the
Magdalen as a luminous body about to melt and
vanish in the divine essence, or the angel flying in a
miraculous light from the family of Tobias, or in the
humble home of a carpenter, where a mother is suck-
ling her child, letting fall a ray from heaven which
suddenly announces to us that this mother is a Vir-
gin, and her child promises us a God !

There is a composition by Rembrandt in which
light plays a sublime role. It is a thought rapidly
written, a sketch washed in with bistre for the pic-
ture of the " Supper at Emmaus." The two dis-
ciples, at table with Jesus Christ, have seen him sud-
denly disappear from before them and are seized
with religious terror, for in the place where they had
just heard his voice and broken bread with him, they
see a supernatural light that has replaced the van-
ished God.

The painter who has imitated the conflict of day
and night has still to imitate the presence of air and
the depths of space. The perspective that changes

142

the lines, changes also the tones, and as a noise
grows feebler by distance and ends in silence, so
shadows and lights, in proportion to their distance

THE SUPPER AT EMMAUS. BY REMBRANDT.

from the eye, undergo a perceptible diminution, and
at a great distance are neither light nor shadow, they
vanish in the tone of the air. Leonardo da Vinci has

PAINTING. 143

proved, by a geometrical figure, that this diminution
can be measured. We may, moreover, observe the
phenomenon at the entrance of a long gallery, equally
lighted in its whole extent, and sustained by columns
or ornamented with statues at equal distances from
each other. If the spectator places himself so as to
see all the statues detached from each other, he will
perceive that the second* is less brilliant than the
first, and the third than the second, and so on. On
the other hand the shadows that were strong on the
first are softened upon the second, and are less and
less strongly marked from one to another to the last
statue, which is, at the same time, the least luminous
and the least shaded, consequently the most indis-
tinctly seen. It is needless to add that at equal
distances this weakening of tone becomes more ap-
parent in a thick and vaporous than in a pure atmos-
phere. But such a diminution in painting is not the
result solely of the lessening of the lights and the
softening of the shadows ; it is obtained by the char-
acter of the execution, the touch. Objects advance
or retreat not only on account of their light or their
darkness, but also, and above all, through the pre-
cision or vagueness with which the painter shows
them to us, that is to say, through the strength or
the weakness of the touch, for it may chance that a
distance is light and yet remains distant, as it also
may happen that the darkest objects are nearest the
frame. These vigorous masses that painters some-
times put in the foreground, — they would be better
in the middle-distance, — are called repoussoirs, be-

PAINTING.

cause their aim is to make the far-off objects seem
farther. To render the distances of his landscape
more luminous, Claude Lorraine took care to place
in the foreground tufted trees with dark foliage, or
ruins of vigorous tone, which, in his picture, serve the
same purpose that side-scenes do for the stage of a
theatre. Provided they are not awkwardly employed,
and the painter knows how to give them an appear-
ance of reality, these masses may be a useful re-
source and even a necessary artifice when the wish
is to heighten the distance and to simulate a vast
horizon. In the portrait at the Louvre of the
" Young man dressed in black," that so long bore
the name of Raphael, but is now attributed to Fran-
cia, in this portrait with an expression so grave, so
penetrating, and so sad, I was about to say poignant,
the whole bust forms, by the depth of its shadows, an
admirable repoussoir, behind which, vanishing out of
sight, is a landscape that fascinates the look and the
thought of the spectator, when, after contemplating
the sad reverie of this young man he turns to the
calmness of nature.

Thus chiaro 'scuro contains a beauty that alone
might almost suffice to painting, for it suffices to the
relief of the body and expresses the poetry of the
soul. But what marvels this great art will produce,
when the painter, decomposing the light, shall have
drawn from it an infinite variety of tints, to clothe
with them the unity of his chiaro 'scuro, when,
finally, he shall have found his color-box in a sun-
beam !

XIII.

COLOR BEING THAT WHICH ESPECIALLY DISTIN-
GUISHES PAINTING FROM THE OTHER ARTS, IT IS IN-
DISPENSABLE TO THE PAINTER TO KNOW ITS LAWS, SO
FAR AS THESE ARE ESSENTIAL AND ABSOLUTE.

IF there is affinity between chiaro 'scuro and sen-
timent, much more is there between sentiment and
color, since color is only the different shades of
chiaro 'scuro.

Supposing the painter had only ideas to express,
he would perhaps need only drawing and the mono-
chrome of chiaro 'scuro, for with them he can repre-
sent the only figure that thinks, — the human figure,
which is the chef d1 ceuvre o>{ a designer rather than
the work of a colorist. With drawing and chiaro
'scuro he can also put in relief all that depends upon
intelligent life, that is life in its relation to other
lives, but there are features of organic, of interior
and individual life that could not be manifested with-
out color. How for instance without color give,
in the expression of a young girl, that shade of
trouble or sadness so well expressed by the pallor of
the brow, or the emotion of modesty that makes her
blush ? Here we recognize the power of color, and

10

146 PAINTING.

that its role is to tell us what agitates the heart,
while drawing shows us what passes in the mind, a
new proof of what we affirmed at the beginning of
this work, that drawing is the masculine side of art,
color the feminine.

As sentiment is multiple, while reason is one, so
color is a mobile, vague, intangible element, whiie
form, on the contrary, is precise, limited, palpable
and constant. But in the material creation there
are substances of which drawing can give no idea ;
there are bodies whose distinctive characteristic is in
color, like precious stones. If the pencil can put a
rose under the eye, it is powerless to make us rec-
ognize a turquoise or a ruby, the color of the sky
or the tint of a cloud. Color is par excellence, the
means of expression, when we would paint the sen-
sations given us by inorganic matter and the senti-
ments awakened in the mind thereby. We must,
then, add to chiaro 'scuro, which is only the external
effect of white light, the effect of color, which is, as it
were, the interior of this light.

We hear it repeated every day, and we read in
books that color is a gift of heaven ; that it is an im-
penetrable arcanum to him who has not received its
secret influence ; that one learns to be a draughtsman
but one is born a colorist, — nothing is falser than
these adages ; for not only can color, which is under
fixed laws, be taught like music, but it is easier to
learn than drawing, whose absolute principles can-
not be taught. Thus we see that great designers are

PAINTING. 147

as rare, even rarer than great colorists. From time
immemorial the Chinese have known and fixed the
laws of color, and the tradition of those laws, trans-
mitted from generation to generation down to our
own days, spread throughout Asia, and perpetuated
itself so well that all oriental artists are infallible col-
orists, since we never find a false note in the web of
their colors. But would this infallibility be possible
if it were not engendered by certain and invariable
principles ?

What, then, is color ?

Before replying, let us take a look at creation. Be-
holding the infinite variety of human and animal
forms, man conceives an ideal perfection of each
form ; he seeks to seize the primitive exemplar, or at
least, to approach it nearer and nearer, but this con-
ception is a sublime effort of his intelligence, and if,
at times, the soul believes it has an obscure souvenir
of original beauty, this fugitive memory passes like a
dream, and the perfect form that issued from the
hand of God is unknown to us ; remains always
veiled from our eyes. It is not so with color, and it
would seem as if the eternal colorist had been less
jealous of his secret than the eternal designer, for he
has shown us the ideal of color in the rainbow, in
which we see, in sympathetic gradation, but also in
mysterious promiscuity, the mother-tints that engen-
der the universal harmony of colors.

Whether we observe the iris, or look at the soap-
bubbles with which children amuse themselves, or,

148 PAINTING.

renewing the experiment of Newton, use a triangular
prism of crystal to analyze a ray of light, we see a
luminous spectrum composed of six rays differently
colored, violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red.
How do these colors strike the eye? As sounds do
the ear. As each sound echoes in modulating itself
upon itself and passes, by vibrations of equal length,
from fullness to a murmur, and from a murmur to
silence, so each color seen in the solar spectrum has
its maximum and minimum of intensity ; it begins
with its lightest shade and ends with its darkest.

Newton saw seven colors in the prism, doubtless
to find a poetical analogy with the seven notes of
music ; he has arbitrarily introduced, under the
name of indigo, a seventh color which is only a
shade of blue. It is a license that even the greatness
of his genius cannot excuse. These seven colors
he called primitive; but in reality there are only
three primitive colors. We cannot put in the same
rank yellow, red, and blue, which are simple colors,
and violet, green, and orange, which are composite
colors, because we can produce them by combining
two by two the first three, the orange, by mixing yel-
low and red, the green, from yellow and blue, the
violet, from blue and red.

Antiquity, which did not wait till Newton's day, to
observe the colored light of the iris, admitted only
three as truly mother-colors, and the evidence of
truth forces us to-day to return to the principle of
the ancients, and to say, there are three primary

PAINTING. 149

colors, yellow, red, blue, and three composite or bi-
nary colors, — orange, green, violet- In the intervals
that separate them, are placed the intermediate
shades whose variety is infinite, and which are like
the sharps of color which precede, and the flats
which follow them.

Separated, these colors and these shades enable us
to distinguish and recognize all the objects of cre-
ation. Reunited they give us the idea of white.
White light is the union of all colors, all are con-
tained and latent in it.

This composition of white light once known, we
can define color. It is the property all bodies have
of reflecting certain rays of light, and absorbing all
others. The jonquil is yellow, because it reflects the
yellow rays and absorbs the red and blue. The ori-
ental poppy is scarlet, because it reflects only the red
rays and absorbs the blue and yellow. If the lily is
white, it is because, absorbing no ray, it reflects all,
and a body is black because absorbing all rays, it re-
flects none. White and black, properly speaking,
are not colors, but may be considered as the extreme
terms of the chromatic scale.

White light containing the three elementary and
generative colors, yellow, red, and blue, each of these
colors serves as a complement to the other two to
form the equivalent of white light. We call comple-
mentary'each of the three primitive colors, with ref-
erence to the binary color that corresponds to it.
Thus blue is the complement of orange, because

'50

PAINTING.

orange being composed of yellow and red, contains
the necessary elements to constitute white light.
For the same reason yellow is the complement of
violet, and red of green, Reciprocally each of the
mixed colors, produced by the union of two primitive
colors, is the complement of the primitive color not
employed in the mixture ; thus orange is the comple-
ment of blue, because blue does not enter into the
mixture that produces it.

Law of complementary colors. If we combine
two of the primary colors, yellow and blue, for in-
stance, to compose a binary color, green, this binary
color will reach its maximum of intensity if we place
it near its complement — red. So, if we combine
yellow and red to form orange, this binary color will be
heightened by the neighborhood of blue. Finally, if
we combine red and blue to form violet, this color
will be heightened by the immediate neighborhood
of yellow. Reciprocally, the red placed beside the
green will seem redder ; the orange will heighten the
blue, and the violet the yellow. It is the reciprocal
heightening of complementary colors in juxtaposi-
tion that M. Chevreul called " The law of simulta-
neous contrast of colors"

But these same colors that heighten each other by
juxtaposition, destroy each other by mixture. If you
place red and green in equal quantities and of equal
intensity upon each other, there will remain only a
colorless grey. The same effect will be produced if
you mingle, in a state of equilibrium, blue and

YELLOW.

ORANGE.

Nasturtium.

RED.

Saffron

Garnet.

Sulphur.

GREEN.

Turquoise.

BLUE.

Campanula.

VIOLET.

See Frontispiece for colored diagram.

PAINTING. 153

orange, or violet and yellow. This annihilation of
colors is called achromatism.

Achromatism is also produced if we mingle in
equal quantities, the three primitive colors, yellow,
red, blue. If we pass a ray of light across three cells
of glass rilled with three liquids, yellow, red, blue, the
ray that has traversed them will pass out perfectly
achromatic, that is colorless. This second phenom-
enon does not differ from the first, for if the blue
destroys the orange, it is because the orange con-
tains the two other primary colors, yellow and red ;
and if the yellow annihilates the violet, it is because
the violet contains the two other primary colors, red
and blue. Thus we see how just is the expression,
friendly and hostile colors, since the complementaries
triumphantly sustain or utterly destroy each other.

To enable one to recall this phenomenon it is in-
dispensable to the reader to form a chromatic rose
or to have present to the mind that of which we
give a drawing accompanied by a colored engrav-
ing.1

At the angles of the upright triangle are the three
primary colors, yellow, red, blue ; at the angles of
the reversed triangle, the binary colors, orange,
green, and violet ; between these six colors combined

1 This rose of colors is a mnemonic image. It in some sort renders
visible the law of complementaries, and expresses its truths. If we
divide the circumference into 360° we see clearly that each of the per-
fect binary colors is equally distant from the two primaries that com-
pose it. Thus orange is 60° from the yellow and 60° from the red.
We see also where the domain of the six colors begins and ends.

J54

PAINTING.

two by two are placed the intermediate shades ; sul-
phur, turquoise, campanula, garnet, nasturtium, saf-
fron.

YELLOW.

Sulphur. A Saffron.

GREEN

Turquoise.

BLUE.

ORANGK.

Nasturtium.

RED.

Campanula

Garnet.

VIOLET.

Observe ; if we choose in this rose three colored
points, that form an equilateral triangle, the colors
situated at these three points will have all the prop-
erties of the complementaries. Let us take, for in-
stance, the sulphur, nasturtium, and campanula ; these
three tints, being placed at the angles of an equilate-
ral triangle, will be perfectly achromatic, that is,
united in equilibrium, they will absolutely destroy
each other, while if we place together the sulphur
and the garnet which is exactly opposite it, they will
reciprocally heighten each other, because they are
complements each of the other.

But the complementary colors have other virtues
not less marvellous than those of mutually heighten-
ing and destroying each other. " To put a color

PAINTING. 155

upon canvas," says Chevreul, " is not merely to
tint with this color all that the pencil has touched, it
is also to color with its complement the surrounding
space ; thus a red circle is surrounded by a light
green aureole, less and less strongly marked accord-
ing to its distance from the red ; an orange circle is
surrounded by a blue aureole, a yellow circle by a
violet, and reciprocally."

This had already been noticed by Goethe and by
Eugene Delacroix. Eckermann relates (" Conversa-
tions de Goethe"), " that walking in a garden with
the philosopher, upon an April day, as they were
looking at the yellow crocuses which were in full
flower, they noticed that turning their eyes to the
ground, they saw violet spots." At the same epoch,
Eugene Delacroix., occupied one day in painting yel-
low drapery, tried in vain to give it the desired bril-
liancy and said to himself: " How did Rubens and
Veronese find such brilliant and beautiful yellows ? "
He resolved to go to the Louvre, and ordered a car-
riage. It was in 1830, when there were in Paris
many cabs painted canary color ; one of these was
brought to him. About to step into it, Delacroix
stopped short, observing to his great surprise that the
yellow of the carriage produced violet in the shadows.
He dismissed the coachman, entered his studio full
of emotion, and applied at once the law he had just
discovered, that is, that the shadow is always slightly
tinged with the complement of the color, a phenom-
enon that becomes apparent when the light of the

1 56 PAINTING.

sun is not too strong, and " our eyes," as Goethe
says " rest upon a fitting background to bring out
the complementary color."

Is this color produced by the eye ? It is not for
us to decide ; but it is certain that in going out of a
chamber hung with blue, for instance, for some mo-
ments we see objects tinted with orange. " Let us
suppose," says Monge (" Geometric Descriptive"), that
we are in an apartment exposed to the sun, whose win-
dows are covered with red curtains ; if in the curtain
there is a hole three or four lines in diameter, and a
white paper be held at a little distance to receive the
rays of light that pass through this hole, these rays
will make a green spot upon the paper ; if the cur-
tains were green the spot would be red."

Monge does not give the reason of the phenome-
non. I believe it is, that our eye being made for white
light, needs to complete it when it receives only a
part. To a man who perceives only red rays, what
is necessary to complete the white light? Yellow
and blue ; but these are both contained in green. It
is green then that will reestablish the equilibrium
of the light in an eye wearied by red rays.

From having known these laws, studied them pro-
foundly, after having intuitively divined them, Eu-
gene Delacroix became one of the greatest colorists
of modern times, one might even say the greatest, for
he surpassed all others, not only in the aesthetic lan-
guage of his coloring, but in the prodigious variety
of his motives and the orchestration of his colors.

PAINTING. 157

Like a singer endowed with the whole register of the
human voice, he has widened the limits of painting
by adding new expressions to the language of art.

Again, if we mix two complementary colors in un-
equal proportions, they will partially destroy each
other, and we shall have a broken tone that will be a
shade of grey. Make, for instance, a mixture in
which there shall be ten parts yellow and eight vio-
let; there will be destruction of color or achromat-
ism for eight tenths, but the other two tenths will
form a grey shaded with yellow, because there was
excess of yellow in the mixture. Thus are formed
all the innumerable varieties of color that we call
lowered tones, as if nature employed for her ternary
colorations the destruction of color, as she uses death
to maintain life.

The law of complementary colors once known,
with what certainty the painter will proceed whether
he wishes to attain brilliancy of color, to temper his
harmony or to make it striking by abruptly bringing
together tints that suit the expression of a warlike or
tragic scene. Suppose it is necessary to lower a
vivid vermilion, the artist learned in the laws of color,
instead of softening by soiling it at hazard, will lower
it by the addition of blue, and thus will follow the
path of nature.

But without even touching a color, one can
strengthen, sustain, lower, almost neutralize it, by
working upon its neighbor. If we place in juxtapo-
sition two similars in a pure state, but of different de-

158 PAINTING.

grees of energy, as dark red and light red, we shall
obtain a contrast by the difference of intensity and
a harmony by the similitude of tints. If we bring
together two similars, one pure, the other broken, for
instance, pure blue and grey blue, there will result
another kind of contrast that will be moderated by
resemblance. The moment colors are not to be em-
ployed in equal quantities, nor of equal intensity, the
artist is free, but within the limits of infallible laws.
He must try his doses, must distribute to his tints
their places and roles, calculate the extent he will give
them, and make, as it were, a secret rehearsal of the
drama his coloring will form. He must employ the
resources of white and black, foresee the optical mix-
ture, know the vibration of the colors, and finally
take care of the effect the diversely colored light is
to produce, according as it is of the morning or the
evening, from the North or the South.

White and Black. Two centuries before Newton,
Leonardo da Vinci wrote, " White is not a color by
itself, it contains all colors." White, in truth, is never
whiter, that is more perfect, than when it reflects the
most light and is absolutely colorless. Of black
there are several kinds : negative black, that pro-
duced by the thickest shades of night ; black by in-
tensity, that produced by a primary color at its high-
est degree of concentration. Suppose three cylin-
ders of glass filled with the most concentrated yellow,
the darkest blue, the most intense red ; each of these
three primary colors will give the notion of black.

PAINTING. 159

But if you mix white with this black, the quality yel-
low, red, or blue of the color in the cylinder will re-
appear, and the coloration will become more brilliant
in proportion as you increase the quantity of white,
in other terms, the quantity of light, — normal black
is formed by the mingling of the three primary col-
ors, in a state of equilibrium, and at their maximum
of intensity, a mixture that produces, as we have seen,
achromatism. " The richer the colors are in color-
ing principles," says Charles Bourgeois (" Manuel d'
Optique experimental "), " the more obscure is the
achromatism." As the least excess of yellow, red, or
blue suffices to shade the achromatism, the painter in
composing his black may leave in it an impercept-
ible coloration, in view of the effect he wishes to ob-
tain. But freed from all shade, in a pure state, black
is no more a color than white.

What, then, will be the effect of black and white
in painting ?

If the coloring of the picture is of extreme magnif-
icence and of great variety, the white and black —
whether in pure state or as grey — acting as non
colors will serve to rest the eye, to refresh it, by
moderating the dazzling brilliancy of the whole rep-
resentation. But applied against a particular color
the white heightens, the black lowers it. Why ?
Because a red, for instance, is less luminous the red-
der it is, if we place white near it becomes compara-
tively less light, Consequently redder. On the con-
trary, if you place black beside the red, the latter will

1 60 PAINTING.

seem less red ; for all that a color gains in light it
loses in energy. The proof is that by force of light it
would vanish in white, as by force of vigor and con-
centration it would resolve itself into black. One
more example. Let us take cinnabar^ a substance
composed of sulphur and mercury, from which we
obtain the brilliant red used in glass painting. The
ore is a dull red, but as it is broken it acquires
more surface, and penetrated by the white of the
light loses the dull, dark color, and when reduced
to an impalpable powder, becomes of a brilliant
scarlet — vermilion.

Independent of these actions and reactions, — I
say reaction because every color put beside white or
black tints them slightly with its complement, —
black and white have an aesthetic value, a value of
sentiment. Thus the spot of white upon the mantle
of Virgil in Delacroix' " Barque du Dante," is. a ter-
rible lighting up in the midst of the darkness ; it
shines like the lightning that furrows the tempest.
At other times this powerful colorist uses white to
correct the contiguity of two colors like red and blue.
In one of the pendentives that so magnificently dec-
orate the Library of the Corps Legislatif, the execu-
tioner who has cut off the head of John the Baptist
is dressed in red and blue, two colors whose j uxtapo-
sition is softened by a little white which unites them
without sacrificing the energy suitable to the figure
of an executioner. Thus we realize a rare harmony,
that of the tricolor-flag. Ziegler has observed that

PAINTING. l6l

this flag spread out horizontally presents a discordant
whole, but through the effects of the folds, the quan-
tities become unequal and one color dominating
another harmony is produced. " The wind that agi-
tates the stuff in varied undulations makes the three
colors pass through all the attempts at proportion
that an intelligent artist can do ; sometimes the effect
is admirable."

White and black should appear in the picture only
in small doses, black especially, which, instead of be-
ing extended over a great space, should be divided
and repeated upon narrow spaces as a sordine to the
color in a lugubrious picture. Black and white thus
dispersed produce a tragic effect in the " Shipwreck
of Don Juan," in which, upon a dark emerald sea,
they detach themselves like funeral notes that ex-
press to the eye the anguish of these shipwrecked
ones whom hunger has maddened and who are tossed
between the hope of life and the grasp of death.

The Optical Mixture. One day in the library of
the Luxembourg we were struck with the marvel-
lously rich effect produced by Delacroix, the painter
of the central cupola, where the artist had to combat
the obscurity of the concave surface he had to paint,
and to create an artificial light by the play of his
colors. Among the mythological or heroic figures
that made up the decoration, and which were walk-
ing in a sort of enchanted garden, we distinguished
a half-nude woman, seated in the shadows of this
Elysium, whose flesh preserved the most delicate, the

1 62 PAINTING.

most transparent tints. As we were admiring the
admirable freshness of this rose-tone, an artist friend
of Delacroix, who had seen him at work, said smiling,
" You would be surprised if you knew what colors
had produced the rosy flesh that charms you. They
are tones that seen separately would seem as dull as
the mud of the street." How was this miracle
wrought ? By the boldness with which Delacroix
had slashed the naked back of this figure with a de-
cided green, which partly neutralized by its comple-
ment rose, forms with the rose in which it is absorbed
a mixed and fresh tone apparent only at a distance,
in a word a resultant color which is what is called
the optical mixture.

If at a distance of some steps, we look at a cash-
mere shawl, we generally perceive tones that are not
in the fabric, but which compose themselves at the
back of our eye by the effect of reciprocal reactions
of one tone upon another. Two colors in juxtaposi-
tion or superposed in such or such proportions, that
is to say according to the extent each shall occupy,
will form a third color that our eye will perceive at a
distance, without having been written by weaver or
painter. This third color is a resultant that the
artist foresaw and which is born of optical mixture.

But how to obtain these mixtures without making

o

the form bend to the intentions of the colorist?
That is the feeble side of all painting in which color
dominates. When our eye perceives simultaneously
several colors, the resultant effect depends upon the

PAINTING.

163

form of the objects colored, their proportions, their
manner of being, their dependence, their grouping.
To understand this let us suppose two complemen-
tary colors, red and green, placed in juxtaposition

upon a rectangular panel divided into two bands R.
G. the two colors will reciprocally heighten each
other, especially along the frontier that separates them.
If now we cut another panel in very narrow paral-
lel bands, and paint these bands alternately red and
green, the eye no longer perceiving distinctly the red
and green bands, the individuality of the color will
disappear with the individuality of the form, and it
will happen that the red and the green mingling with
and destroying each other by this apparent mixture,
optical mixture, the second panel will appear grey

and colorless.

A

If the line of junction be broken so as to permit
the mutual penetration of the contraries, it will pro-
duce upon the lines A B a perfectly colorless tint,
upon condition that the indentations shall be small

1 64 PAINTING.

enough to be confounded to the eye. But if the
proportion changes and the indentations are unequal
there will appear a reddish grey or a greenish grey
of charming delicacy.

A similar phenomenon will be produced upon a
yellow stuff starred with violet and upon a blue stuff
sown with orange spots.

The Vibration of Colors. " The parallel between
sound and light is so perfect it is sustained even in
the least particulars." Thus said a savant of genius,
Euler (" Lettres a une princesse d' Allemagne "). As
the grave or sharp sounds depend upon the number
of vibrations of the stretched cord in a given time ;
so we may say that each color is restricted to a cer-
tain number of vibrations which act upon the organ
of sight as sounds do upon the organ of hearing.
Not only is vibration a quality inherent in colors,
but it is extremely probable that colors themselves
are nothing but the different vibrations of light
Why does the flower, so fresh and brilliant, lose its
color if we detach it from the stem ? Because for
want of the nourishing juice it will lose all vigor, all
spring, and the tissue, like a relaxed cord, will not
render the same number of vibrations.

The Orientals, who are excellent colorists, when
they have to tint a surface smooth in appearance,

PAINTING. 165

make the color vibrate by putting tone upon tone in
a pure state, blue upon blue, yellow upon yellow, red
upon red ; thus they obtain harmony in their stuffs,
carpets, or vases, even when they have employed but
a single tint, because they have varied its values from
light to dark. A man who possessed marvellous
knowledge of the laws of color and of decoration
from having studied them in the Orient, Adalbert
de Beaumont, was the first among us to react against
that equality of color we sought in our fabrics as a
perfection, and which the Chinese properly regard as
a fault. " The more intense the color, whether red,
lapis-lazuli, or turquoise," says de Beaumont, " the
more the Orientals make it miroiter, shade it upon
itself, to render it more intense and lessen its dry ness
and monotony, to produce, in a word, that vibration
without which a color is as insupportable to our eyes
as under the same conditions a sound would be to
our ears."

Color of the Light. In nature the light comes to
us variously colored, according to climate, the me-
dium, the hour of the day. If the painter have cho-
sen an effect of colorless light, of diffused and grey
light, the laws of the heightening and enfeebling of
the colors will not be contrary to those of chiaro
'scuro, that is to say it will suffice to render vigor-
ously the colors in the light and to soften them in
the shadow (except for shining stuffs and polished
bodies like satin, coats of mail, etc). But if the
painter chooses a cold and blue light, or warm and

1 66 PAINTING.

orange, he cannot represent the phenomena produced
if he has not the notions of color.

Blue drapery, for example, under the cold light of
the north will have its blue heightened in the light,
attenuated in the shade. On the contrary if the
light is orange like that of the sun, this same dra-
pery will seem much bluer in the shade and less so in
the light. Why? Because the mixture of the com-
plementary colors will have substituted a tinted grey
for the pure blue of the stuff in the lightest portions.
Now replace the blue by orange drapery, pour upon
it the light from the north, the blue of this light will
partly neutralize the orange, but that will happen
only in the light, for in the shadow the orange, find-
ing itself sheltered from the rays that would have
taken its color, will preserve all the value the
shadow can give it. Whence it results that the
effect of colored light upon colors can be obtained
only by the absolute knowledge of the phenomena
we have described.

Such are the laws that must guide the painter in
the play of colors ; such are the riches at his dispo-
sal. Happy if he adds to optical beauty the expres-
sion of the wished- for sentiment, if tuning his pal-
ette to the diapason of the fable or history, he knows
how to draw from it the accents of poetry. In truth
it is only in our days that the eloquence, the aesthetic
value of color has been discovered. Veronese and
Rubens are always intent upon presenting a fete,
playing a serenade, even when the drama repre-

PAINTING. 167

sented demands sombre, austere, or cold harmonies.
Whether Jesus Christ is seated at the marriage at
Cana, or marches to Calvary, or appears to the disci-
ples at Emmaus, Veronese scarcely changes the
moral character of his colors. He does not renounce
the enchantment of the eye, with naive serenity he
contradicts at need the severity of the theme by ex-
ternal magnificence. In his turn Rubens scarcely
makes a difference in the coloring he uses to paint
those superb women in the " Garden of Love," and
that which will show us in a " Last Judgment," these
same women, like a stream of fresh and rosy bodies,
precipitated into hell. Even when he wishes to
frighten he is determined to seduce.

More poetical, more penetrated by his subject,
more moved by his emotion, Eugene Delacroix never
fails to tune his lyre to the tone of his thought, so
that the first aspect of his picture shall be the pre-
lude to his melody, grave or gay, melancholy or tri-
umphant, sweet or tragic. Afar off, before discerning
anything, the spectator forebodes the shows that will
strike his soul. What desolation in the crepuscular
sky of the " Christ at the Tomb." What bitter sad-
ness in .the picture of " Hamlet and the Grave-dig-
gers." What a sensation of physical well-being in
the " Jewish Wedding in Morocco," whose harmony,
composed of two dominant and complementary colors,
red and green, gives the idea of coolness while allow-
ing us to divine without an incandescent sun. What
a flourish of trumpets in the coloring of the " Jus-

1 68 PAINTING.

tice of Trajan," in which we see the Roman Em-
peror in his pomp and his purple issuing from a
triumphal arch, accompanied by his generals, his
trumpeters, and his eagles, while a woman bathed in
tears, throws at his feet a dead child. Below, livid
tones ; above, the splendid, radiant gamut, an arch
filled with azure, a sky that becomes dazzling by the
contrast formed by the tones of an orange-colored
trophy.

Thus colorists can charm us by means that science
has discovered. But the taste for color, when it pre-
dominates absolutely, costs many sacrifices ; often it
turns the mind from its course, changes the senti-
ment, swallows up the thought. The impassioned
colorist invents his form for his color, everything is
subordinated to the brilliancy of his tints. Not only
the drawing bends to it, but the composition is dom-
inated, restrained, forced by the color. To introduce
a tint that shall heighten another, a perhaps useless
accessory is introduced. In the " Massacre of Scio,"
a sabre-tache has been put in the corner solely be-
cause in that place the painter needed a mass of
orange. To reconcile contraries after having height-
ened them, to bring together similars after having
lowered or broken them, he indulges in all sorts of
license, seeks pretexts for color, introduces brilliant
objects ; furniture, bits of stuff, fragments of mosaic,
arms, carpets, vases, flights of steps, walls, animals
with rich furs, birds of gaudy plumage; thus, little
by little, the lower strata of nature take the first place

PAINTING. 169

instead of human beings which alone ought to oc-
cupy the pinnacle of art, because they alone repre-
sent the loftiest expression of life, which is thought.

In passionately pursuing the triumph of color,
the painter runs the risk of sacrificing the action to
the spectacle. Our colorists go to the Orient, to
Egypt, Morocco, Spain, to bring back a whole arse-
nal of brilliant objects ; cushions, slippers, narghilehs,
turbans, burnous, caftans, mats, parasols. They make
heroes of lions and tigers, exaggerate the importance
of the landscape, double the interest of the costume,
and of inert substances, and thus painting becomes
descriptive ; high art sensibly declines and threatens
to disappear.

Let color play its true role, which is to bring to us
the cortege of external nature, and to associate the
splendors of the material creation with the action or
the presence of man. Above all let the colorist
choose in the harmonies of color those that seem to
conform to his thought. The predominance of color
at the expense of drawing is a usurpation of the rel-
ative over the absolute, of fleeting appearance over
permanent form, of physical impression over the em-
pire of the soul. As literature tends to its deca-
dence, when images are elevated above ideas, so art
grows material and inevitably declines when the
mind that draws is conquered by the sensation that
colors, when, in a word, the orchestra, instead of ac-
companying the song, becomes the whole poem.

XIV.

THE CHARACTER OF TOUCH, THAT IS THE QUALITY
OF THE MATERIAL EXECUTION, IS THE PAINTER'S LAST
MEANS OF EXPRESSION.

TOUCH is in painting what calligraphy is in writ-
ing. Certain delicate observers have thought it pos-
sible to discover the moral physiognomy of a person
from his handwriting. Doubtless they go too far,
but we cannot deny that there is a secret relation
between the hand that guides the pen and the mind
that guides the hand. Insipid as are the flourishes
our writing-masters multiply without reason, in
which they envelope their capitals and roll up their
tail pieces, or the ambitious spirals that pretend
even to model the human figure, yet it is curious
to follow, in the manuscript of a writer, the gait of
his pen and to recognize in his march, timid or reso-
lute, careful or negligent, embarrassed or precise,
something that resembles the accent of a person-
ality.

Open a book ; it seems at first as if nothing hu-
man could be hidden under the form of those letters
that a machine has printed. Nevertheless by the
choice, the arrangement of these types which the ad-
mirable correctness of language calls characters, you

PAINTING. 171

will, at the first look, be informed of the nature of
the book, you will foresee if it is grave or trivial,
familiar or imposing, and, according to the changes
of type upon the same page, you will distinguish the
places where the tone of the discourse has changed,
simply by noticing the .passages the printer has put
in smaller type, as if to make the author speak in a
lower tone. These delicate shades were formerly
marked in our language by the noblest, liveliest ex-
pressions. A work of lofty wisdom was printed in
Pkilosophy-sma\\. pica. For another they chose
Saint Augustine, which awoke austere memories
and seemed to refer to the Jansenism of thought.
The Cicero denoted a grave type that was elegantly
lengthened in books of poetry ; the Gaillarde was
a light letter that in name as in fact marvellously
suits the pages of current literature — thus the hu-
man soul has its part in the expressive vocabulary
that in our days has been superseded by a mute and
inert numeration.

Touch is the hand-writing of the painter, the
stroke of his mind. Nevertheless what it ought to
reveal to us is not so much the personal character of
the master as the character of his work ; for the
touch is conditioned by essence ; it has its varying
conventionalities, its relative truths and beauties. It
is a quality that in the history of painting always
comes last. The greatest artists of the Renaissance
have generally disdained it. Michael Angelo painted
the "Last Judgment" with as much care and deli-

1 72 PAINTING.

cacy as if it had been an easel picture. Raphael ex-
ecuted the frescoes of the Heliodorus and the At-
tila almost as he did those of the Parnassus and the
School of Athens. Leonardo da Vinci treated all
his pictures with equal touch, smooth and melting.
Titian himself made little difference, and only in the
" Peter Martyr " and the " Assumption " he seems
led by his subject to accents more animated,
more marked than usual. Correggio handled the
brush with affection. His execution had as much
charm for him as for us and he tasted the pleasure
of losing and finding himself in color, but his pen-
cil was always the same, always caressing, sweet,
and tender.

It was only in the seventeeth century that the
conventionalities of touch were felt and that one
thought seriously of varying its characters. Poussin
painting " Pyrrhus Saved " or the " Rape of the Sa-
bines " treats his painting with a manly hand and in-
tentional rudeness, while he guides the pencil with
more gentleness when he represents Rebecca and
her companions. Rubens expresses his feeling with
more energy than ever when he puts on the stage
the peasants of the " Kermesse," or the furious,
breathless hunters of the wild-boar. Ribera writes
every muscle with the precision of a surgeon ; he
runs thick paste over dry tendons ; he sculptures all
the folds of the skin, hollows all the wrinkles, and
heaps up lumps of color upon the unequal asperities
of the epidermis. Van Dyck pushes to extremity

PAINTING. 173

the suppleness, the eloquence of touch. With a
facile and delicate pencil he spreads the light upon
the brow, glides over the contour of the temples,
strongly marks the lines of the nose, and resolutely
applies the white of the eye or the luminous point
of the pupil ; but his touch, indicative of the object
represented, has hardly any other shades ; it remains
uniform in presence of the variety of models.

Soon come the mannerists in execution, Jouvenet,
Restout, who, after having drawn squarely — it is
their word — paint in an angular way ; afterwards
Boucher, Van Loo, Greuze whose hammered touch
makes the surface resemble creasings of paper or
bits of marble chipped under the mallet of the
sculptor.

Finally in our school, thirty years ago, the roman-
ticists by a legitimate reaction against the soft
enamel-like manner of Guerin and Girodet affected
an abundance of paint, threw on the color with a
trowel, and boast, as a sign of skill, of a hard execu-
tion, an execution purposely careless and heightened
by successive layers of paint.

Such is an abridgment of the history of touch,
and the reader can see what principles flow from it

The first law of taste in these matters is that the
touch ought to be broad in large and delicate in
small works. Michael Angelo executed with extreme
delicacy the grand " Prophets " of the Sistine Chapel
and the terrible figures of the " Last Judgment,"
but it is an example not to be imitated now because

1 74 PAINTING.

genius has prerogatives that belong to it alone, and
because it is not allowable to go back to those first
ages of painting in which art, young and strong, dis-
dained secondary means and ignored the last decora-
tion of form, which is touch.

So it would be shocking to see a small genre
picture like those of Terburg or Metsu treated with
negligence or want of delicacy. If the mind has
little to do in the lower regions of painting, we must
at leastt find there the mind of the pencil. What in-
terest can an old housewife, scouring a kettle or pre-
paring a meal, offer if the vulgarity of the subject is
not redeemed by the spirituelle accentuation of each
detail, if the beholder is not amused for a moment by
the treatment that allows him to touch with the
finger the changing down of the duck that is being
plucked, or the fur of the hare that is being skinned,
the white freshness of an oyster on the shell, the
velvety skin of a peach, the warty zest of a lemon —
and as the varied aspect of these surfaces, their sa-
vor, can only be expressed by touch, the correctness
of color not sufficing, a certain address of the pencil,
appropriate to the nature of each substance, is de-
manded.

Nevertheless if great works should be broadly
painted, boldness of execution ought not to be
pushed to insolence, as Tintoret and some other
Venetians imitating him have often done. It is only
in stage decoration that the brush can be handled
like a broom. The overloaded, hasty, negligent

PAINTING. 175

manner had its admirers at the commencement of
the decadence, but the indifference of posterity has
condemned these coarse painters. Veronese is a
model of the way in which breadth of treatment
may be reconciled with respect for detail.

On the other hand easel-pictures may be delicately
handled without losing a certain apparent liberty by
means of which the labor they have cost is con-
cealed. Metsu is a good master to study. Instead
of being melted and porcelain-like, like Mieris, his
touch preserves accents full of spirit; it indicates in
a head, even if very small, the flat lines of the
mouth, the cartilage of the nose, the corner of the
eye, and those lights that give play to the counte-
nance. Metsu teaches us what to understand by
" finished," in a small picture. To finish is to ani-
mate by some expressive touches that give an air of
frankness and liberty. To finish is to remove by
a few light, elegant strokes of the brush the insipid
neatness, the uniformity that communicates to the
spectator the ennui it must have caused the painter.
To finish is to characterize a distance, to shade a
contour, to give to the essential objects of the pic-
ture, for instance to the expression of the face or
the hand, that last accent which is life.

That the touch ought to be varied especially in
works of small or average size, according to the
character of the objects, is a thing of course ; yet how
many painters, even those eminent for practical skill,
have failed in this conventionality. Look at one of

1 76 PAINTING.

Greuze's young girls, weeping over a broken pitcher
or a dead bird ; beside the fine, delicate, transparent,
satiny flesh, the chemise is rendered by a pencil that
does not give even the idea of linen or gives an idea
so gross as to shock. Gauze even, instead of being
expressed by varnish, is often indicated by thick,
dirty paint.

Teniers, on the contrary, admirably accommodates
his touch to the physiognomy of each object. With-
out the least difficulty, and as if in sport, he recog-
nizes and characterizes the flesh tints ; here the
fresh, thin skin of a young farm girl, there the rough
skin of an old fiddler with a warty nose. He throws
a ray of light over the ivory of a clarionette, or a
brilliant point upon a shining stone pot. He affirms
with resolution and a generous laying on of paint
the enlightened part of a cuirass, or caresses with
sweetness the reflections of a wash-basin. The solid-
ity of a wall, the lightness of the pack hooked to
the shutter, the hair of a saddle, the buckle of a
leather strap, the silkiness of long hair, the brush of
short hair, the soft look of the slate upon which the
dirty wench has marked the scot of the tap-room ;
all is expressed with marvellous correctness, seasoned
by a thought of malice or irony.

But the touch of Teniers, who in this regard may
be considered the painter, par excellence, is not only
varied ; it is unequal, because the master insists upon
the objects represented only in proportion to their
importance and also because his hand is continually

PAINTING. 177

guided by the sentiment of perspective. If he
paints the hoops of a cask, he follows its circular
form ; if he paints the flying sides of the table, his
pencil instinctively directs itself towards the point
of sight. Vivid and thick upon the light parts of
objects placed upon the level of the frame, his
paste becomes lighter, thinner, more melting when it
represents the distant parts of the picture if it is a
landscape, or the depths of the back-chamber if it is
a tap-room, and the touch less and less decided, soft-
ened and breathed upon indicates the presence of air.
The more the atmosphere is thickened by distance,
the more the color is thinned, to indicate by its
transparency and vagueness, the successive layers of
it. The touch makes aerial perspective visible after
the drawing has traced the linear perspective. It
designates what is near and what is afar off, and
thus destroys the idea of a level surface to substi-
tute the illusions of space. Velasquez is a superior
master for the expression of ambient air, and Claude
Lorraine has carried it to magic in his enchanting
landscapes. His frame is like a window opening
sometimes upon the boundless level of a calm sea in
which the sun is sinking, sometimes upon a smiling
valley that extends out of sight.

But outside of these conventionalities which re-
quire that the handling of the pencil shall be varied,
the touch of the painter will always be good if it is
natural, that is according to his heart. An orator
who should seek to imitate the voice of another

1 78 PAINTING.

would be no more ridiculous than the painter affect-
ing a manner not his own. Ribera is coarse, but his
coarseness does not displease because it is sincere.
Rembrandt has a mysterious palette, because he has
a genius dreamy and profound. Velasquez is frank,
because his pencil is guided by the muse of truth.
The touch of Poussin is like his character, manly,
noble, and expressively simple. Rubens handled the
brush with the nerve and warmth that animated him,
he is fascinating because his temperament fascinates
him. Prud'hon, amorous and sad poet, chose a
soft, sweet execution that lulled lines to sleep, tran-
quillized shadows and let nature appear only through
a veil of love and poetry. There are a hundred
manners of painting well, but it is none the less true
that the practice of the pencil ought never to fall
into the cold daintiness of Mignard, nor the insi-
pidity of a Carlo Dolci or a Van der Werff, nor the
glassy polish of a Girodet, nor the minute and sterile
~ of a Denner.

XV.

CERTAIN CONVENTIONALITIES OF PAINTING VARY AND
KlUST VARY ACCORDING TO THE CHARACTER OF THE
WORK AND THE NATURE OF THE SURFACE THE ARTIST
HAS TO COVER.

THE painter may work for the selfish enjoyment
of one man or for the pleasure of a whole people.
But in proportion as his work is ennobled by the
number of people who will enjoy it, the surfaces
upon which he should exercise his genius become
vaster and more solid, and a proof of the dignity to
which he elevates himself is the necessity of paint-
ing upon the walls of an indestructible monument,
and thus to link his destiny to that of architecture.

Mural painting, that which decorates large edi-
fices, is the loftiest field for the artist, for in promis-
ing long duration it demands a work that shall be
worthy of it.

What will be, of all the modes of painting, the
most suitable to the decoration of buildings? Let
us examine the different methods with reference to
their sentiment and to the material employed ; fresco,
wax, distemper, oil, pastel, guache, enamel, miniature,
glass, and encaustic painting.

l8o PAINTING.

Fresco Painting. This is so called because execu-
ted with water colors upon fresh plaster. This plas-
ter, made of slacked lime and fine sand, is applied
upon a coating rough enough to make it adhere to
it. The fresco needs a wall free from materials
tinctured with saltpetre, and the colors must be such
as the lime does not change. When the artist has
polished and made very smooth the surface to be
painted, he traces upon it the previously prepared
composition. The designs, of the size of the pict-
ure, are called cartoons, because prepared upon large
sheets of paper glued together. Upon the damp
wall the drawing is traced with a point of ivory or
wood, or the contour of the drawing is pricked with
a pin and a tampon dipped in charcoal or red pow-
der passed along the line of the holes which fixes
the design on the plaster. Afterwards the artist fol-
lows the tracing with a sharp-pointed pencil or stylus,
and this indelible contour is called the nail of the
fresco. We find it in several Pompeian paintings
executed upon a mortar of lime and sand, and as it
could only have been done upon lime still damp it is
evident these paintings are frescoes.

The tracing made, the artist must write his
thought with a sure, prompt hand, without hesita-
tion, without change of purpose. " As long as the
plaster is fresh," says Gruyer (" Essai sur les fresques
de Raphael"), "the carbonate of lime takes up the
coloring matter, envelopes it, forms upon its surface
a true crystallization like a varnish perfectly translu-

PAINTING. l8l

cent and without sensible thickness, which protects
the fresco from all external causes of destruction.
The painting thus made upon a properly prepared
wall is the most solid, the most beautiful imaginable.
It is unchangeable and resists the extremes of tem-
perature as well as the influence of humidity."

When the plaster becomes dry it can no longer fix
and protect the color. The artist can return to his
work only by painting over the first layers. But
these touches must be made with colors in distem-
per, that is diluted with liquid glue, which, not ab-
sorbed by the mortar, have not the same durability
as frescoes. These retouches in distemper Vasari
declares contemptible, cosa vilissima. But the
greatest masters have not disdained such retouches.
Another method is to go over the fresco, when the
plaster is dry, with colored crayons. But time redu-
ces these crayon strokes to powder and the fresco
becomes what it was at first. Moliere has very well
said : —

" Avec elle, il n'est point de retour k tenter
Et tout au premier coup se doit exdcuter."

It is then an exaggeration to call fresco " the most
beautiful painting imaginable." It is certain it is
limited in its means ; it admits only natural earths,
mineral colors being changed by the lime ; it does
uot lend itself to the delicacies of imitation, does not
admit brilliancy and magnificence of coloring. But
in the decoration of a Christian temple the fault of
fresco becomes a title to admiration. Its pale colors

1 82 PAINTING.

have something grave and religious, and assimilating
itself to the monument it borrows its tranquil
strength, its imposing solidity. The figures, instead
of being added like an external decoration, seem to
be incorporated in the stone and the human feeling
to have penetrated the walls of the edifice.

Nevertheless if some great masters prefer fresco
on account of its austere charms and its historic
celebrity, others prefer different methods.

Wax Painting. This consists in the use of oil
colors diluted, at the moment of putting on, with
liquid wax mixed with essential oil, but without the
intervention of fire, that is without encaustic. The
advantage of this manner, is preserving the painting
from the alternation of shadows and bright spots
that in oil painting are scarcely corrected by the var-
nish that generalizes the gloss. The use of wax not
only gives to the whole a soft and uniform aspect
which allows the spectator to see the picture well
wherever he may be placed, but it resembles the
fresco with less lightness, less limpidness of tone.

The greater number of our wall painters at the
present time use wax because they can retouch their
work indefinitely and can use more brilliant colors.
Far from being restrained by the presence of the
stone, they seek to suppress even the appearance of
it, they would make the walls diaphanous and show
us a higher world, a heaven more beautiful than
ours, figures poetized by the colors of the prism,
and blended in an exalted harmony.

PAINTING. 183

^

Painting in Distemper. Wall painting accommo-
dates itself equally to distemper ; it is perhaps the
oldest of all methods. The colors are steeped in
glue ; a glue made of shreds of the skin, snout, and
feet of goats, as described by Cennini, or with the
yolk of egg, " rosso di uovo" says Vasari, " diluted
with vinegar to prevent putrefaction, and mixed
with the milk of the fig tree."

Richer than fresco, distemper permits the use of
mineral colors. It is applied to walls after covering
them with smooth, fine plaster. The painter uses
bright, strong tints in anticipation of the fading they
will undergo in drying. Before oil painting was per-
fected by Van Eyck and taught in Italy by Anto-
nello da Messina, the Italian painters used distemper
upon walls, wood, and canvas. It sufficed to Man-
tegna, Giovanni Bellini, and Perugino to make
chefs d'&uvre as durable as frescoes. Mantegna's
:' Triumph of Julius Caesar " was thus painted, and
the magnificent picture of Bellini (the " Virgin sur-
rounded by Saints ") that was in the church of San
Giovanni e Paolo at Venice. Less liable to grow
brown than oil painting, tempera has almost as
much consistency with less heaviness. Memling
used tempera with egg when he painted the famous
shrine of St. Ursula in the hospital at Bruges.

Fresco, tempera, and wax then are preferable for
wall painting; by this we mean not only the decora-
tion of walls but that of cupolas and ceilings.

1 84 PAINTING.

CEILINGS AND CUPOLAS.

At first thought it seems ridiculous that fabulous
or historical scenes should be represented upon flat
or vaulted surfaces above our heads. It is absurd
that in a place where we could only see the sky the
painter should show us, for instance, the shady paths
of Versailles and Louis Quatorze walking with
Madame de Montespan to whom Puget is presenting
marble statues of frightful weight. To paint fig-
ures that, without being sustained by wings, shall
eternally keep a horizontal position, is a license that
would seem shocking ; the more that the spectator
is obliged to dislocate the neck to look at a picture
that he would see much better on the wall, and which
has verisimilitude only when placed vertically. The
Italians have finely criticized the painting of ceilings,
by placing in the middle of rooms decorated with
them, tables in which mirrors are framed, in which
the visitor sees below him what is painted above.

The only object that can decorate a ceiling with-
out shocking conventionalism, is a sky with flying
figures ; but here a new difficulty presents itself,
before which the great masters, with the exception
of Correggio, were arrested. Figures in the air
borne by their wings or upon clouds, can scarcely be
seen except foreshortened, and if the figures are
numerous, the foreshortening, by their variety, be-
comes bizarre even to extravagance. That happens
when the artist has plafonned his figures, that is

PAINTING.

represented them seen from below upward. One
seems to touch his knees with his chin, another has
the hips coming out of his shoulder-blades. At the
palace of Te in Mantua certain mythological figures
are represented in a manner almost grotesque. Here
the horses of the Sun threaten to fall on the specta-
tor, dragging the god of poetry, who shows his prose
side. There a Neptune seems cravatted with the
muscles of the breast, so that the forms, under the
pretext of obeying rigorously the laws of perspec-
tive, undergo deviations the most monstrous, the
most offensive to the sight.

NEPTUNE. BY GIULIO ROMANO.

(Palace of Te, Mantua.)

Michael Angelo, to whom it would have been but
play to draw the boldest foreshortenings, painted the

1 86 PAINTING.

ceiling of the Sistine Chapel as he would have
painted a wall divided into compartments and Ra
phael did the same in the soffit of the Farnesina,
representing the banquet of the gods like tapestry
surrounded by a border, fixed to the ceiling by
nails.

Must we proscribe the painting of cupolas ? No.
The cupola is an imitation of the vault of heaven,
and there is poetry in the idea of an open sky, a di-
aphanous dome that gives to the lifted eye of the
believer a glimpse of paradise. But these aerial spec-
tacles, separated from us by some distance, should be
still more by aerial perspective, which, enfeebling the
shadows, veiling the lights, lends to the celestial fig-
ures an indecision, a happy vagueness. Too much
vigor in the contrasts would wound instead of
charming the eye, and the spectator might fear to
see fall upon his head or upon the pavement of the
church, groups that by the animated play of the
lights and shadows would too strongly detach them-
selves from each other. In the whole, especially in
the figures that have no apparent support on the
cornices, there must be the .blond tints whose light-
ness reassures the eye.

An excellent judge of art, Henri Delaborde, has
said upon this subject in his " Melanges sur 1'Art
Contemporain," " In decorating with frescoes the
chapel of San Giovanni at Parma the pencil of Cor-
reggio made through the walls an immense opening
to the sky, and thus apparently suppressed the very

PAINTING. 187

field upon which he was working. Bolder than
Michael Angelo, who, painting the ceiling of the Sis-
tine, figured upon the solid surface only symmetrical
apertures framed in the ornaments of a simulated
architecture, Correggio was not afraid to annihilate
the real architecture, and to suspend in the bosom of
this limitless space groups with irregular lines, infi-
nitely multiplied and rolled over one another ac-
cording to the most difficult laws of vertical perspec-
tive."

But instead of making holes throughout the whole
extent of vaults that are to be covered with luminous
tints and show us glimpses of the sky, this writer
thinks it would be better to pierce the cupola only
at intervals marked by the ribs of the building with-
out making the architecture seem to crumble away
to give place to a capricious image of what we sup-
pose passing without.

Oil Painting. When we look at certain pictures
of Perugino, of the Vivarinis, John Bellini, Man-
tegna and those of the Florentines of the fifteenth
century, Masaccio, Filippino Lippi, Angelico da
Fiesole, we ask if oil painting were really a progress,
and if we should prefer a method that changes the
colors, tarnishes, blackens them, and that seems con-
demned to an eternal dimness, to the temperas that
still are so fresh, so transparent, so pure. It is re-
markable that the older pictures are the better they
are preserved. " Antique paintings," says Lanzi, " in-

1 88 PAINTING.

suit modern paintings by their preservation." Almost
all the master-pieces in oil are threatened with de-
struction. If the pictures of Van Eyck, the reputed
inventor of oil-painting, are still brilliant with youth
and seem unchangeable, it is not because he mixed
his colors with the oil of flax, but in spite of this
mixture, and because of the excellence of the var-
nish he combined with his oil, which has given his
works the look of enamel.

The Baron Taubenhein wrote in the last century
(" De la Peinture a 1'huile-cire "), " The oily particles
with which the picture is loaded, drying, leave their
cells by evaporation. Reaching the surface they en-
counter a pellicle formed by the parts already dry, or
an impenetrable varnish that prevents the evapora-
tion, and all these oily particles arrested in their de-
sertion on the frontiers of color, form a mass of
grease that gradually condenses and embrowns the
picture."

Independent of the continual change of modern
works, and without reckoning the changes that
metallic colors like cinnabar undergo in their com-
bination with oil, painters know how irritating is the
presence of the embus, that is to say, those dull par-
ticles that here and there make a spot in conse-
quence of the unequal drying of the oil ; they know
what a restraint upon their inspiration is the neces-
sity of waiting weeks till the sketch is sufficiently
dried to be resumed ; they know they must pay
dearly for the privilege inherent in the painting they

PAINTING. 189

have learned, and which consists in allowing vigor-
ous browns, profound shadows, more energy in the
relief, and at the same time more mystery in the
whole.1

Rub down the shadows, thicken the lights, is the
precept taught in the schools and that Rubens, Te-
niers, Van Dyck, have charmingly practised, but it
is only a relative truth. To paint shadows lightly
with thin layers of color diluted in oil, is a good
method, if one works upon a canvas prepared with
glue, very dry, consequently very clear. If on the
contrary it is prepared with oil, one cannot glaze the
shadows, because the oil used in the preparation will
show through the glaze, and will make the shadows
so much the darker, as, in glazing, oil will have been
added to oil. In such a case it is better to thicken
the shadows in the sketch, which will hinder their
blackening, by stifling the foundation that will disap-
pear under the thickness of the paint.

Veronese, who painted on canvas prepared with
water-colors, could glaze the shadows ; but one who

1 Few painters now-a-days think of the duration of their works, and
consider the quality of the substances they employ. As an exception
we may mention Meissonier for the scrupulous care he takes in the
choice and purity of his materials. He has kept exposed at the win-
dows for years bottles of oil preserved from the dust, but accessible to
the air, and which, under the influence of the sun, have lost their color-
ing particles and become as clear as water, at the same time have ac-
quired more mucilage and turned to honey. He grinds, purifies, tries
his colors himself ; thus his little pictures, independent of their other
merits, which are of the first order, do not change, and promise to
maintain themselves in a state of perfect preservation.

PAINTING.

works upon canvas prepared with oil will do well to
cover even the shadows with colors thick enough to
interrupt the communication of the foundation with
the surface. It is always necessary to load the
colors in the light portions more than in the shadows,
because the granules catching the sunbeams in their
passage, add a natural to the artificial light.

Pastel Painting. This is a painting with pastes
of different colors put on dry, and soft enough to be
powdered under the finger. A colorist who wishes
to catch fugitive tints, a painter who desires to assure
himself promptly of a certain effect, uses pastel, be-
cause it demands no preparation, lends itself to im-
provisation, and may be interrupted and resumed at
pleasure.

But pastel is not merely an auxiliary means ; some
excellent painters have made it a thing apart, and
have used it successfully in portraiture.

Applied to paper glued upon canvas, the pastel
produces soft, opaque shadows ; it has not the depth
of oil painting, neither has it its shining spots that
reflect the light like a mirror. The freshness of
colors, the brilliancy and tenderness of flesh-tints,
the down of the skin, the velvety appearance of fruit,
cannot be better rendered than by these crayons of
a thousand shades that can be placed together in
vivid contrast or blended with the little finger, and
whose heaping up of layers grasps the light. The
pastel is suitable only for the portrait, landscape, or

PAINTING. 191

still life. But the grace of pastel is also its defect —
to be friable and to fall in dust. In the eighteenth
century La Tour and Loriot invented an ingenious
way of remedying this defect — throwing upon the
pastel in the form of rain a composition of fish glue
and spirits of wine. The experiment was success-
fully performed before the Academy of Painting.
But it is to be feared that in giving it solidity and
durability,. we should take from it the exquisite dust,
that flower of youth, so to say, that makes its fleeting
delicacy, but also its charm, its value.

Enamel Painting. Enamel is a vitreous sub-
stance colored by metallic oxides ; is composed of
two substances, the colorless, vitreous body, and the
oxides that give it color. The enamel is opaque or
transparent ; to make it opaque a certain quantity of
oxide of brass is added to the vitreous mass. By
the action of fire the enamel is fixed to the object it
covers. It may be metallic, copper, gold, silver ; or
non-metallic, porcelain, faience, brick, stone, lava.

When applied to non-metallic bodies, the enamel
is called varnish. Of whatever the paste may be, it is
capable of receiving colors that must be taken from
the mineral kingdom to remain indestructible in the
fire, and which, mingled with vitreous powder, melt,
uniting with and fixing themselves upon the surface
of the faience, porcelain, or lava. It often happens
that the baking changes the colors. The enamel
painter must anticipate what they will be upon com-

192 PAINTING.

ing out of the fire, not to speak of the thousand ac-
cidents that may happen in the course of the work.
The care, the necessary prudence, are of a nature to
chill the imagination of the artist; so enamel paint-
ing is only used for copies, particularly if one works
upon plates of porcelain. Its most brilliant and
valuable use is to decorate vases. " Enamel paint-
ing," says Dussieux (" Recherches sur 1'Histoire de
1'Email "), can resist the action of the air, the water,
heat, cold, dampness, dust, all the destructive agents
of oil painting ; thus enamel applied on a grand
scale to the preservation of master-pieces, would offer
inestimable advantages." These advantages enamel
painting possesses to-day, thanks to the discoveries
made thirty years ago by an artist industrious to the
point of genius, Morteleque.

Before him enamel painting, which unites brill-
iancy to imperishable solidity, could be used only
upon porcelain plates of small size, and with diffi-
culty made straight and smooth ; he thought of
enamelling and painting with verifiable colors great
slabs of volcanic lava, that could be smoothed and
adjusted to one another with extreme precision, so as
to form immense surfaces perfectly plane and contin-
uous. Before him the painter had no white capable
of being mixed with the other colors and of produ-
cing, by modifying them all, the scale of luminous
tones ; he was constrained to use the white of the
foundation, to reserve it, as they say; he could not
pile on his colors, superpose them, put a clear tone

PAINTING. 193

upon the brown, and this restraint rendered his labor
slow and painful. Morteleque invented a white,
similar in effect to that which is used in oil painting,
and which allows the artist to treat at his will the lu-
minous parts of a picture, without having to manage
the white foundation. The plates of lava or porce-
lain became then like canvases, upon which one
could henceforth paint freely and boldly.

Let us add that the palette of the painter upon
lava, although deprived of cinnabar and vermilion,
which are replaced by reds less vivid and of different
values, is richer than the palette of the oil painter.
" The colors," says Jollivet (" Peinture en Email sur
Lave "), " are mixed with porphyrized glass, which
does not change their brilliancy. When they are ex-
posed to fire, the powdered glass liquifies, envelopes
the molecules of the colors, and fixes them upon the
enamel. Before having been subjected to the action
of fire, the work has the appearance of a fresco
painting. In this state it can be retouched with im-
punity." Subjected to two or three fires, and, at
need, to a fourth baking, the picture may be led
gradually from the preparations of the sketch to the
last perfection.

Thus new horizons were opened to monumental
painting, and we may hope that in future the walls of
temples and public buildings will be covered with
vitrified paintings, brilliant and forever unchange-
able.

This discovery rendering useless the enormous

194 PAINTING.

labor and expense of mosaic, will enable us by means
of imperishable imitations to preserve the master-
pieces of art that are perishing ; the Sistine Chapel,
the " Last Supper," the Stanze of Raphael, the
pictures of Titian, the frescoes of Correggio.

If the art of enamelling pottery is almost as old
as the first earthen vases, if for ages it was known
to the Chinese, the Egyptians ; if the Phoenicians
transmitted it to Greece ; if that artistic people made
designs of incomparable elegance with filigranes of
colored glass, arranged in mosaics and soldered in
the fire, it seems certain that enamel painting upon
metals is a modern invention, dating no farther back
than the fifteenth century. This proceeding, which
consists in painting with fusible and indestructible
colors upon metal covered with a coating of enamel,
as one would paint upon canvas or wood, was in-
vented, or at least rediscovered at Limoges in
France.

Enamel painting upon metal has decided advanta-
ges. The colors melt with the first enamel, penetra-
ting it enough to give the picture a beautiful trans-
parency, and at the same time an impermeable
varnish, that protects it better than a covering of
glass. Upon porcelain the colors melt together, but
do not fuse with the enamel, and the effect is heavier,
more opaque.

Guaches and Aquarelles. In guache painting the
colors are ground in water and diluted with gum-

PAINTING. 195

water mixed with white. Guache is useful to store
up souvenirs of a landscape, to note the local colors
of the ground, of rocks, sky, etc. It is particularly
useful for stage decorations, and the sketches of large
compositions, has much freshness and transparency,
and does not exclude force of tone, is an expeditious
and convenient kind of painting, because one re-
quires only brushes, a loaded palette, and a glass of
water, but the colors dry so quickly it is difficult to
blend them ; hence landscapes in guache have a dry,
flat look, in which the skies seem cut up, the greens
crude, the yellows and reds hard.

To prevent the too rapid drying of the water,
artists have mixed with the gum some glutinous sub-
stance, like the milk of the fig tree, jujube paste, the
yolk of egg; thus guache becomes distemper, of
which it is a variety. In the hands of a skillful
painter it is not without sweetness and harmony.

A gauche painting may have a colored back-
ground, and the lights are put on in successive
layers, that is to say, the painter covers the whole
surface of the picture, while in the aquarelle the
artist, working upon a white ground, reserves this
white for the lights of the picture, and instead of
putting on the colors in successive layers, he washes
them. The aquarelle is often called a lavis, though
the word is applied especially to monochrome aqua-
relles made with India ink or sepia.

If tints diluted with gum-water want body and
consistency, they are nevertheless light, cheerful, and

196 PAINTING.

transparent. Literally the aquarelle is only a colored
drawing, but in our days the English school has
given it a solidity that makes of it almost a new
kind of painting. Its colorations have body at the
same time that its distances are melting and lumi-
nous. It is at once limpid and robust; has much
relief and much atmosphere.

Miniature. This word was also written migna-
ture, because it was supposed to come from the old
word mignard, mignon. It is in truth a kind of
painting that is always mignon, elegant and delicate ;
sometimes mignard, tender, sweet. Although one
can paint in miniature in many ways, with egg, glue,
oil, enamel, — proved by the many beautiful works
executed in France and Italy in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, — yet it has been agreed to
call a miniature a water-color upon vellum or ivory.
Nevertheless, the delicate paintings upon vellum or
parchment that so richly ornamented the middle-age
manuscripts, were rather guaches, because soft colors
were used, and the flesh-tints heightened with white;
while miniatures upon ivory are real aquarelles be-
cause the white of the background is preserved.
These paintings constituted in France an art, that
as early as the beginning of the fourteenth century,
when Dante came to Paris, was called illumination.
That this art was known to the ancient Romans, and
flourished in the time of Augustus, is certain, but we
are permitted to believe that the most skillful illumi-

PAINTING. 197

nators were those of our own country. It was among
the first hermits of the Thebai'd and Syria, in the
fourth century, that the taste for books revived, and
with it the desire of ornamenting them. The greater
their voluntary poverty, the greater luxury the ceno-
bites displayed in their copies of the holy books.
They wrote the verses in letters of gold upon purple-
tinted parchment. Then came the Greek monks,
who, painting in miniature upon golden back-
grounds, represented in them fantastic animals and
ornaments borrowed from their Byzantine architec-
ture. To finish the ornamentation of the sacred
text, they framed it with a running vine, and created
the art of the vignette.

Once in possession of this art our French minia-
turists wrought wonders. Abandoning bizarre fan-
cies to draw near to nature, they looked through the
windows of the sanctuary and painted upon the parch-
ment of their manuscripts the flowers and plants of
their garden, the fruits of their trellis, the crawling
or flying insects, and the real living animals of crea-
tion. Some illuminators, like Jehan Fouquet, orna-
mented with small pictures the books of prayers and
the Greek and Latin classics, and they have left in
them models of invention and naturalness ; some-
times even, in spite of their diminutiveness, a senti-
ment of grandeur.

If art were a simple imitation of the true, every
representation in miniature would be proscribed, be-
cause it implies a contradiction between the distance

198 PAINTING.

that the smallness of the image supposes, and the
careful finish that destroys the idea of this distance.
As soon as an object is represented in miniature, I
can see it only by drawing it near my eye ; but seeing
it near I ought to see it clearly, for indecision would
be absurd in an object near the eye. On the other
hand, as it is only perspective that lessens objects,
everything smaller than nature is deemed afar off.
There is then a manifest contradiction in the art of
the miniaturist, since by the precision of forms he
draws near what by its diminutive size seems distant.

Happily, art is something besides imitation of the
real ; it is a beautiful fiction that gives us the mi-
rage of truth, upon condition that our soul shall be
the accomplice of the falsehood.

It is an error then to suppose that the miniature
painter ought to treat his little figures as if they
were sunk in the picture, separated from us by suc-
cessive layers of atmosphere, and that he ought to
make them seem afar off by means of light and
aerial colors. Nothing would be more insipid than
a vaporous execution that should allow what we hold
in our hands to vanish from our eyes. It is with
miniatures almost as with engraved stones. Taste
counsels happy trickeries, that strongly interest us in
essential features, leaving the rest out of sight.
Upon the ivory of the miniaturist, as well as the
intaglio or cameo of the engraver, art ought to ex-
press much with little. Since the artist must insist
upon that upon which expression depends, let him

PAINTING. 199

content himself with putting " in evidence " the great
features, and gliding over the rest. Crowded into a
small space he will exclude all that is useless, but
in compensation will strongly express what is deci-
sive.

Some renowned miniaturists, on the contrary,
have worked with a magnifying glass, have in their
portraits brought out all the details that nature pre-
sents on a grand scale ; details one can find again
upon their ivories with a magnifying glass. So
much minutia produces only characterless works.
Accenting everywhere, they do not accent enough
where it is necessary.

Painting upon Glass belongs rather to ornamenta-
tion than to the art of the painter, as we have de-
fined it.

Encaustic Painting. The word encaustic desig-
nates a kind of painting in which the colors, mixed
with wax and resin, are softened, melted and fixed by
the aid of fire, and afterwards rendered lustrous by
rubbing.

Different passages from ancient authors, especially
Vitruvius, Pliny, and Philostratus, prove that the
most famous painters of Greece executed their works
in encaustic. But their method of working is a
secret half lost. To rediscover it, researches full of
sagacity were made in the last century by the Count
de Caylus, but he only invented imperfect means.

200 PAINTING.

In the present century a pupil of David, Paillot de
Montabert, has discovered a kind of painting if not
similar, at least analogous to that of antiquity.

He has proven that encaustic is not, like oil paint-
ing, liable to grow yellow and dark unequally in a
way to destroy the chiaro 'scuro of the picture ; that
it allows portions of the picture to be made soft
or transparent, according as one wishes to express
what is aerial and remote, or what is near the
eye and plainly visible ; that it is more suave, richer
then tempera and almost as luminous ; that, much
better than fresco, it lends itself to the delicacies of
imitation, that it may be employed for all sorts of
pictures, large or small ; and that it is excellent to
decorate vaulted ceilings or walls exposed to the
external air or to dampness ; finally, that encaustic is
as unchangeable to-day, as it was among the ancient
Greeks, when pictures perished only by violent death.
The "Battle of Marathon," painted by Polygnotus,
was preserved under an open portico at Athens for
more than nine hundred years.

Plutarch rendered homage to the long duration of
encaustic, when he wrote : " The sight of a beautiful
woman leaves in the mind of an indifferent man only
an image quickly effaced ; such is an aquarelle. In
the heart of a lover this image is as it were fixed by
the power of fire ; it is an encaustic painting ; time
never effaces it."

XVI.

ALTHOUGH THE DOMAIN OF THE PAINTER is CO-
EXTENSIVE WITH NATURE, THERE EXISTS IN HIS ART A
HIERARCHY FOUNDED UPON THE SIGNIFICANCE, RELA-
TIVE OR ABSOLUTE, LOCAL OR UNIVERSAL, OF HIS
WORKS.

GRANTING that painting is nothing more .than the
mirror of life, all its representations cannot be placed
in the same rank, because life is so unequally divi-
ded among those things that make up the spectacle
of creation. The chain that unites all beings is
composed of rings, at first simple and rude, which
by degrees grow complicated, refined, developed, and
in proportion as the chain ascends, become more
richly wrought, more precious. It is not then a mat-
ter of indifference to represent inorganic bodies in
their inertia, or to paint animate beings in movement.
Neither is it a matter of indifference to take as a
model the plant that vegetates, a captive upon the
soil, or the animal that moves, led by a spirit still
blind but certain — instinct ; much more man, who,
the resume of all anterior creations, crowns them by
intelligence, and dominates them because himself
free.

202 PAINTING.

Moreover, if the dignity of the painter be meas-
ured by the difficulty of his work, what a difference
between the copy of a shapeless stone or a plant, and
the imitation of a well-proportioned and symmetrical
body, eternally submissive to the laws of a divine
rhythm, and yet one in which the symmetry is con-
stantly broken by movement and restored by equi-
librium. Is art a picture of life ? Then nothing can
be more interesting than the human figure, since
man is the most alive of all creatures. Is art the
manifestation of the beautiful? The human figure
is still the noblest object of its studies, because man
is the only creature capable of attaining the highest
beauty. Whatever then may be the definition of art,
there exist in its works inferior and superior methods
according as the objects represented are more or less
endowed with life.

This truth may be expressed in another way. The
more necessary rigorous imitation is in a picture, the
nearer it approaches inferior methods ; the more the
things to be imitated are susceptible of interpreta-
tion, the higher painting will elevate itself.

Let us take some examples. Every day we see in
the streets of Paris merchants' signs that strike us
by the singular truth of the imitations painted upon
them. Sometimes they are hats, sabres, cartridge-
ooxes that stand out so as to deceive the eye. Some-
times panels of mahogany, oak, or maple, imitated
with such perfection as to mislead the cabinet-maker
himself. But everybody knows these are the works
of an artisan, not an artist.

PAINTING. 203

Now suppose that painters, real artists, Roland de
la Porte and Chardin, for instance, are pleased to
paint what we call still life, that is, cooking utensils,
provisions, fruits, furniture ; the common things of
the interior of a house. Less an artist, and less in-
telligent than Chardin, Roland will make a table on
which he will place perhaps a bowl full of peaches,
a cup and saucer, a bottle of brandy, bits of sugar, a
tin box of coffee, a water-bottle, bread, plums — the
whole well represented, as well as they could be by
Chardin.

The latter examining the work of his brother ar-
tist, will notice that the utensils and the fruits are put
together hap-hazard ; that one does not drink brandy
out of a cup ; nor put peaches near a tin coffee-
box — and that the picture instead of being com-
posed of these different elements is overloaded with
them. .He will not commit such a fault; he will
group upon his little canvas better assorted objects,
for example, two porcelain cups, a coffee-pot, a sugar-
bowl, and a glass of water. These two cups of old
Dresden china, forming a tete-a-tete, are there like
persons in the privacy of home, and seem to keep
house as well as the masters themselves. Every one
comprehends that the mistress is not far off, and that
two beings closely united are to sit down at this
table. Something of the pleasant uniformity that
characterizes quiet, happy homes, manifests itself to
us. Here is a simple picture of still life, that says
something to the mind. Apart from the excellence

204 PAINTING.

of the execution, the work of Chardin will be supe-
rior to that of Roland de la Porte, because the one
will only have imitated nature, while the other, in im-
itating, will have interpreted her. Roland draws
near the workman ; Chardin at one step will have
passed over the space that separates the artisan
from the artist.

But in this domain of pure art opened to us by a
true painter simply by showing us two china cups,
everything is not on the same plane, nor at the same
level. Let the models, instead of cups and saucers,
be living, intelligent beings, art rises at once to a
higher stage ; and more difficult, it will also be more
valuable.

The Louvre is full of excellent pictures in which
we can measure the distance between still-life and a
familiar scene, or, as the Dutch say, " a conversation-
picture," like the " Music Lesson " of Caspar Nets-
cher. It is a small panel, upon which we see a
young girl seated near a table covered with a rich
cloth, playing the violoncello. Dressed in white
satin, she is taking a lesson of a music-master who
is smitten with her beauty, and who, clothed in
brown, is thrown back into the middle distance in a
half-tint of shade. The Saint Preux of this Dutch
Julia presents a sheet of music to his pupil, and while
pointing out with his finger the words of the song,
opens his heart. At the moment in which the mute
drama is played in a corner of the picture, a little
page, who has entered noiselessly, advances, holding

PAINTING. 205

a violin in his hand, interrupts the declaration of the
professor, and puts an end to the embarrassment of
the pupil. What has happened ? Why such anima-
tion upon the countenance of the master ? That is
what the young page seems to ask, incapable of com-
prehending the sentiments just exchanged between
two persons, one very much in love, the other on the
point of becoming so.

Is there a man of taste who would not prefer this
picture to one of still-life that Netscher might have
painted with the same talent and a touch as fine, by
grouping on the table-cover the violoncello, the vio-
lin, the bow, the sheets of music, and perhaps the
teacher's forgotten hat?

If painting can elevate itself thus by the mere
substitution of human figures for inanimate objects,
what will it become when it chooses its heroes, no
longer in common life, but in the world of history or
poetry ; when, instead of representing local manners,
it represents the customs of humanity, and its heroic
characteristics ; when it replaces the changing cos-
tume of an epoch by that generalization of vest-
ments suitable to all times and all peoples, which
drapery is ; when seeking beauty of form in its prim-
itive essence and drawing nigh to sculpture, it con-
ceives and creates those immortal types that are
gods ! We see there is a wide interval between Nets-
cher and Raphael, between Chardin and Michael
Angelo. To go over this interval as an observer, is
to explore the entire domain of art, landscape, sea-

206 PAINTJNG.

views, animals, battles, conversation-pictures and fa-
miliar scenes, that properly speaking are genre pic-
tures ; finally history, fable, poetry, allegory.

However diverse these kinds of painting, they can-
not be the basis of a complicated classification. It
would falsify philosophy to find divisions where there
are only shades and varieties. The true distinction,,
the only one, we believe, to establish, is that of which
we have spoken — the difference between imitation,
and style.

XVII.

THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF PAINTING BELONG TO THE
LOWER OR HIGHER METHOD, ACCORDING AS IMITATION
OR STYLE PLAYS IN THEM THE PRINCIPAL ROLE.

IF the reader recalls our definition of style, he will
perceive that the objects embraced by painting are
all susceptible of imitation, but not all of style.

Style being typical truth, exists only for beings
endowed with organic and animal life. The mind
conceives a type of the horse or the lion, because the
organism of the horse and the lion follow a constant
law ; but it is impossible to conceive the type of a
rock or a cloud. Why ? Because those bodies not
being living are not organized ; not being organized
they have no proportion. How, then, discover the nor-
mal form of that which is without form ? How seize
the fixed rule of that which is irregular? How find
a perfect proportion where there exist only varia-
ble dimensions ? When I see the head or leg of a
horse, I can reconstruct the entire animal by virtue
of the fixed relation of the parts to the whole ; but
the half of a stone being given, I cannot know the
form of the other half, because no known principle
has governed the aggregation of its molecules.

208 PAINTING.

Even the creations of the vegetable kingdom, for
the most part, elude a common measure ; they have
no standard, although we notice repetitions, alterna-
tions, that indicate a beginning of regularity and
order, a sketch of life. Who can draw the typical
form of a fruit or a vegetable ? Who can fix the
type of the orange or turnip ? Admitting that the
painter could do this, he would have only a frozen
image, without interest, without savor. For one
orange to represent all oranges, it would be neces-
sary to eliminate precisely that which in the painting
would give to this fruit singularity and attractiveness,
that is, the accidental peculiarities, infinitely varied,
which distinguish one orange from another, the
roughness or smoothness of the rind, the black spots
that have stained its surface, the parasites that gnaw
its skin, the shades of pale yellow or of vermilion
that announce unequal ripeness, as a part has ma-
tured in the sun or in the shade.

These delicate details are the delight of such ar-
tists as David de Heem, or Rachel Ruisch. It
pleases them to particularize by scrupulous imitation
that which, generalized, would become cold and in-
sipid. Have they under the eye a lobster ; their
touch dwells upon the sharp claws, spins out the an-
tennae, lingers over each articulation where a bit of
soft flesh unprotected by the cuirass may be per-
ceived. Have they a lemon to represent ; they will
make you taste the oil of the zest that rolls in a spiral
under the knife ; and how this half-peeled lemon will

PAINTING. 209

make your mouth water when the silver blade passing
through the thick, white skin shows you in the cells
of the fruit that which will refresh and delight the
palate. Do they wish to paint just opened oysters ;
they will make us touch them with finger and lips ;
will sharply define the rough edges of the shell,
grossly foliated exteriorly, but within delicate, trans-
parent, polished, moist, nacred.

They take pride in painting the drops of water on
which the light plays, the pearls " which are," says a
poet, " a malady of the oyster, as poetry is a malady
of men." Lovingly they observe in every object the
curious tones, the delicate shades, the soft and the
shining, the smooth and the rough, the dense and
the friable. They express at the end of the brush
the delicate skin of the plum, its spots, its bloom,
and the downy envelope of the nut, and the cuttings
in the green skin that imprisons the kernel. They
forget neither the butterfly, the worm, the beetle, nor
the fly. In a word, they find delight in the imita-
tions that are for an instant to please the eye.

Thus, the value of such a painting is entirely in
the treatment. When the objects represented rise
in importance, style will find a place.

Landscape. Here still, imitation plays the most
important role, without, however, being so scrupu-
lous, so literal as it was in a picture of still-life. Let
the reality of the landscape be studied in each of the.
elements that compose it, let one perceive in it the

2 I O PAINTING.

presence of the air, the distance of the horizon, the
lightness of the moving clouds, the depth of the
water ; let the land be solid, the stones hard, the
bark rough, the reeds damp, and the bushes thorny ;
let the trembling leaves be traversed by the light,
hollowed by shadows, recognizable in their variety,
by their forms, their movement, — that is indispen-
sable, certainly. The poetry of the fields and forests
travels only in company with truth.

But the painter must idealize the real by making it
express some sentiment of the human soul, and the
proof that faithfulness of imitation does not alone
suffice is, that if the instrument of the photographer
could seize colors as it does forms, it would give us
a certain view of a certain country, but it would not
produce a work of art, — a landscape.

Look at that hut of Rembrandt's, now celebrated
among amateurs under the name of the " Hut of the
Big Tree." Had it painted itself on the plate of the
camera, instead of being seen by the eye of Rem-
brandt, we should, perhaps, pay it no attention; cer-
tainly we should not find in it the sentiment of rus-
tic liberty and happiness that Rembrandt excites in
us after having experienced it himself. Fortunate
cabin ! What profound peace reigns around it. The
city is far, far off; we see it just enough to feel satis-
fied not to be in it. Before the door two children
are busy doing nothing. They are the only living
beings near this dwelling, except a cat that watches a
company of sparrows and two ducks, one of which

PAINTING. 2 1 3

is plucking its feathers with its head thrust under its
wing. One can forget one's self long in contempla-
tion of this sublime disorder, this dilapidated thatch
carpeted with plants, and bright with flowers, and
this heap of fagots from which we might light up the
hearth if we entered to dry our shoes after a prome-
nade through the overflowed meadows. Managed
by a painter like Rembrandt, imitation apparently
the most naive charms us with objects that have no
relation to our affections. An old cask, a broken
wheel, a little wash house under which we hear the
croaking frogs, lilies floating on the lazy waters of
the canal, aquatic plants so well indicated by the pen-
cil of the artist, and the grand and beautiful linden
that gives majesty to a picture so rustic and humble.
Inanimate tilings: but they speak to us a language
that enchants us because Rembrandt has put in it
something of his own heart.

The spectacles of nature want the essential charac-
teristic of art — unity. Nature not only varies every
moment of the day, but in her infinite complexity,
her sublime disorder, she contains and manifests to
us that which corresponds to the most contradictory
emotions. Capable of exciting these emotions in
man, she is powerless to express them. He alone
can render them clear, visible, by choosing the scat-
tered features lost in the bosom of the real, and elim-
inating from them what is foreign to or contradic-
tory of his thought.

If Ruysdael paints a landscape, the sky is over-

"214 PAINTING.

cast, the wind drives the clouds, whistles through the
bushes, sweeps over the fields of grain, and rustles
in the leaves of the old oaks. Under his impas-
sioned gaze, everything grows sombre, takes a charac-
ter of sadness ; the brook becomes a torrent, and rolls
over the uprooted trees; the sun scarcely pierces the
clouds enough to change the characteristics of this
savage nature, and the smile of its light adds to the
melancholy of the picture. Should the painter meet
a sportive farm-girl gayly dressed, he would not see
her, and would never introduce her into his landscape,
in which we see only far-off, ill-defined figures that
enhance its solitude.

Let Berghem paint the same places, the spectator
would not recognize them. The sky is serene, the
forest peaceful, the water flows gently or sleeps in a
pond to which the cattle come to drink, driven by a
joyous peasant girl, in gay, fresh colors, mounted on
an ass. At night even the scene will be made gay
with some drama of light, either peasants kindling a
brush-heap to fish for crabs, or by the half-veiled
light of the moon, travellers and animals traversing
a wooded country, pass through a swampy glade in
which their images are reflected.

Thus the artist master of reality enlightens it with
his eyes, transfigures it according to his heart, and
makes it utter what is not in it — sentiment, and
that which it neither possesses nor understands —
thought.

But is landscape, already stamped with the imprint

PAINTING. 2 1 7

of a personal character, susceptible of being aggran-
dized by style? Two great French painters have
affirmed it in a striking manner, Nicholas Poussin
and Claude Lorrain. Both, without overstepping
the bounds of truth, transport us into countries that
their imagination has embellished, and with real ele-
ments they compose an ideal whole. Their trees
present pleasing forms whose silhouette fills the space
but does not rend it ; their lines, varied without be-
ing fantastic, and contrasted without violence, pre-
serve even in their opposition a solemn breadth and a
calmness full of majesty. The buildings with which
their landscapes are ornamented, recall ancient times
and peoples. Those of Poussin remind of Sicily,
Greece, Egypt, so that one is not surprised to see
on the shore of the waters that bathe them the pur-
suit of Galatea, Diogenes throwing away his bowl, or
Moses saved by the daughter of Pharaoh.

Those of Claude recall sometimes the Golden Age,
those times in which life was a long breath of hap-
piness, when the land of Saturn was inhabited by
fauns and nymphs, when cavaliers were centaurs.
By a sublime transmigration of soul, Claude recol-
lects having lived among the shepherds of Theocri-
tus, having heard the flute of Pan, and upon his
canvas bathed in light, he hollows infinite distances
that are not only depths of space, but perspectives
of the soul. Sometimes he represents a ruined tem-
ple under the shadow of a sacred wood that
stretches out till lost on the horizon ; sometimes he

2l8 PAINTING.

paints with astonishing truth an imaginary gulf in
which ships, built in the workshops of the ideal, set
sail upon long voyages over seas that will never be
upheaved by a storm.

No other school has given such grandeur, such po-
etry to landscape. There is in truth poetry and
grandeur in finding in nature the past of history, in
transforming the field into an Elysium, in making it
the sojourn of the demi-gods ; but upon condition of
not losing sight of the accents of truth, of not sub-
stituting for the characteristics of the fields and
forests the factitious representations of an Utopia.
Nothing is more contrary to the laws of art than the
historic or heroic landscape reduced to a system.
Worth a hundred times more is a bit of ground
naively treated by Karel Dujardin, a little familiar
brook by Van de Velde, or even an oak of Bruandet.
The historic landscape is beautiful only when it is
sincere, that is to say, when, instead of being the
work of a teacher who has not felt what he wishes to
express, it emanates from a master who expresses
what he has felt.

Animals. When they are the principal object in
the painting, animals fall into the list of subjects in
which imitation plays the chief role. They ought to
be simplified and aggrandized by style only when
they figure in a fabulous, composition or in some au-
gust scene in the suite of the gods. They are then
considered as emblematic, and to imitate, them too

PAINTING. 221

closely would be a puerility. When Cybele passes
on her car drawn by lions, when the triumphant
Bacchus guides his panthers, it is not fitting to ren-
der too exactly the fur of these animals, the details of
their manes, the spots upon their skins. They should
retain something mythical, because such animals
being taken as symbols, participate in the divinity
they accompany. How much less effective would be
a decoration in which the steeds of the sun or of
Neptune were introduced, if the artist limited him-
self to copying them from nature, instead of, like
Julio Romano or Polydorus, giving them something
supernatural. When they have played a role in his-
tory, or have been in the service of heroes, animals
may receive the imprint of style. When bulls and
oxen decorated with garlands are led by the victima-
rius to the sacrifice, the artist who wishes to put him-
self in unison with the personages that compose the
drama of his picture, will not go to the stable to
study them. He will rather draw his inspiration
from antique bas-reliefs or engraved stones, because
in them animals are represented in a way that lifts
them above the trivial, and because, each people hav-
ing had its own way of regarding and representing
them, it is of consequence to catch the spirit of those
who were their masters.

There are animals so consecrated by ancient re-
ligions and history, that we cannot escape the tradi-
tions that have ennobled them. Such are the horse,
the lion, the elephant, the tiger, the wild boar, the

222 PAINTING.

stag, the ram, the goat, the eagle, the owl, the ibis,
the serpent, the dolphin, the swan, the dove, the tor-
toise. Aside from the idea evoked by* their presence,
wild animals are more susceptible of being idealized
by style than domestic animals. Those that are al-
ways under our eyes, and associated with our every-
day life, demand close obervation and imitation. The
sheep and cows that were sculptured by Phidias on
the frieze of the Parthenon, are rendered with ex-
treme naivete, while the lions' heads that crown the
cyma of the cornice recall a remoter, loftier nature.

If Jean Fyt, and Jean Leducq, are studying the
habits of dogs, if Hondecoeter, and Simon de Vlie-
ger are painting the life of the barn-yard, their sole
aim is to copy their models faithfully, to be true in
the least particulars. Paul Potter himself has no
other ambition ; he who has the power to charm us
by painting cows and sheep at pasture, and who so
well ' knows how, by the language of drawing and
color, to make apparent to us the unknown idioms
and the hidden poetry of this obscure world, in
which these inferior beings live as in a dream.

If the artist amuses himself by painting an ass
sauntering in a pasture, as Wouvermans has done, in
what way can he interest us other than by details ?
Having munched his thistles, the donkey has stopped
on the brink of a ravine, and seems philosophically
occupied in snuffing up the fresh air, and pensively
listening to the sound of the water. His bony back
and his long ears are vigorously defined against the

PAINTING. 225

clear sky. Involuntarily one draws near the creature
and marks the variety of colors on his skin ; here
black, there grey, yellow in spots, marked with white
under the belly in tones delicate, brilliant, silvery.
We notice where the hair has been worn off by the
rubbing of the bridle, the cicatrized wounds, finally
scrutinize the physiognomy of this dreaming animal,
and its profound quietude. But let the scene change,
let this ass of the fields become the ass of Scripture,
stopped in the way by the angel, or bearing Jesus in
triumph into Jerusalem. What a stupid fault it
would be to insist upon the little details that charmed
us a moment ago. In one of the admirable paint-
ings that decorate the choir of St. Germain-des-Pres,
Flandrin has given a fine example of the style that
transforms the humblest animals when they are asso-
ciated with divine actions.

One means of heightening imitation in animals is
to put into them that fire, dash, fullness of life, that
lend to their passions something human, and that
Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens, and Sneyders have so
well expressed in their battles and hunting-scenes.

Battles and Hunting-scenes have this in common
— it is impossible to paint them with other than
probable truth. How can one represent in a single
instant an action that lasted a whole day? How
preserve in a picture the exactitude of strategic
movements, the precision of the bulletin, the fidelity
of history? The talent of the painter is shown in

226 PAINTING.

choosing the most interesting feature of the action,
the most characteristic episode, the decisive mo-
ment.

Every painting is subject to the rigorous law of
unity. But genius must invent the unity of the bat-
tle or the chase, or know how to unravel it from the
complications of a long recital. The important
thing is to give us a vivid idea of the combat, a
memorable impression by striking one grand blow
upon the imagination. In his " Battle of Aboukir,"
Gros happily personifies the two armies, the two
races, the two forms of courage, by the choice of a
single episode. While Mustapha, thrown -from his
horse, disarmed, shudders at the abandonment of his
soldiers, and with indignant hand strives to retain
the fugitives, his son, to save the father's life, picks
up his sword and presents it to General Murat, who,
as handsome in the melee as on parade, stops short
his Arab horse, and by an heroic and eloquent ges-
ture, spares the vanquished.

In his sublime " Battle of Eylau," the same
painter makes a single figure the resume of a ter-
rible defeat. In the foreground are groups of dead
under the snow, dying disturbed by the noise of the
imperial escort, savage enemies whose wounds our
surgeons dress in spite of them. Farther off, over a
a vast, extended space, we see entire regiments
stretched upon the ground, lines of soldiers who
maintain their ranks even in death, and others in the
ranks awaiting their turn to die. But all these epi-

PAINTSNG. 227

sodes do not hinder the eye from turning ever to the
figure of Napoleon, to that pale face lifted to heaven
in search of the vanished star, and which, ceaselessly
present to the eye, forms the unity of this great dis-
aster.

Sometimes the unity consists in the absence of a
dominant episode ; the battle is then the image of
two armies that seem to obey the breath of contrary
winds, and make of a thousand slaughters one butch-
ery. However, all is not pure invention in such a
picture, but what role shall be given to imitation or
to memory where so many scenes, movements, ges-
tures, attitudes, have lasted but a moment, even sup-
posing the painter engaged in the battle had leis-
ure to see them ?

It was permissible to Raphael, to introduce in the
" Battle of Constantine," the grand style rendered
possible by the action of half-naked figures, and the
tournure of antique arms. Such paintings, repre-
senting under forms of highest beauty the eternal
horrors of war, and under the features of a father
lifting the still warm corpse of his son, the eternal
sorrows that follow human sacrifices, such paintings,
we say, belong to the highest order in the hierarchy
of art. So of the " Battles of Alexander," upon
which Charles Lebrun has imprinted a character
truly epic.

As for the modern battle, with its official truths
and its obligatory uniforms, it has only a value of
anecdote, because it would be unintelligible if the

228 PAINTING.

painter pretended to develop the plan of the general-
in-chief, and to show us the grand manoeuvres.
Horace Vernet in his pictures, Raffet in his litho-
graphs, have tried to preserve, at least in part, the
identity of time and place, and the physiognomy of
the combatants. They felt it would be absurd to
transfigure military men whom one might meet in the
streets of Paris, between two battles, and without hes-
itating between the insipidity of an allusion and the
energy of the truth, they have found it piquant to
paint heroism in overcoat and cap, as they deem it
just to do homage with the popular chiefs, to the
great collective man — the regiment. Unfortunately,
such respect for bulletins and reports, gives exces-
sive importance to little truths, to little things, but-
ton-holes, straps, epaulettes, gaiter-buttons ; the artist
cannot forget these details, because, doing so, he
would sacrifice the interest, the real value of his work.

Michael Angelo said one day to Fran9ois de Hol-
lande : " What painter would be silly enough to pre-
fer the shoe of a man to his foot?" He thus
affirmed the superiority of the nude over the vest-
ment, and necessarily the superiority of drapery
over costume. Without being so austere as sculp-
ture, the art of the painter rises in proportion as it
frees itself from conventionalities purely conditional
and local. Costume varies according to place and
time ; it is often an affair of caprice or fa'shion ; dra-
pery, on the contrary, is eternal, because it is the

PAINTING. 229

clothing of humanity. The interest of familiar
painting is heightened, when to the representation
of customs is added the piquancy of costumes, but
high art rejects costumes, and admits, willingly, only
draped figures.

When Raphael had entirely broken with Gothic
usages, and gotten rid of the habit contracted by
him. under his master Perugino, of dressing the Gos-
pel characters according to the fashion of Florence
or Perugia, he learned what grandeur there is in
Greek drapery. The mantles that cover the philos-
ophers in the " School of Athens," like those that
envelop the " Prophets " of the Sistine Chapel, were
not cut by the tailors of Rome, but conceived, ad-
justed by the supreme taste of Raphael, the free
genius of Michael Angelo.

The Venetian School, so charming and so gor-
geous in Veronese, so imposing in Titian, is inferior,
as a whole, to the Roman and Florentine schools,
because it displayed stuffs instead of studying dra-
pery, was pleased with the habiliments of the stage,
and with painting satin, taffeta, velvet, brocade, with
the sole object of pleasing the eye. By the profu-
sion of their costumes, the Venetians were led to
indulge in gaudy colors and ostentatious displays, so
brilliantly renewed by Rubens, that lead one, little
by little, to neglect sentiments and ideas, to replace
the eloquence of art by picturesque phrases.

There is, however, one kind of painting for which
drapery is not suitable — the portrait.

230 PAINTING.

Here, the truth of imitation would seem to be a
quality of the first order, and resemblance by means
of clothing a necessity. Nevertheless, portraiture is
one of the highest branches of art, and only the
greatest artists have excelled in it ; in Italy, Titian,
Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto ; in
Spain, Velasquez; in Germany, Holbein and Albert
Du'rer ; in the Low Countries, Anthony More, Ru-
bens, Van Dyck ; in England, Reynolds and Law-
rence ; in France, Rigaud, Largilliere, David, Gerard,
Ingres.

If works of art ought to be measured by the de-
gree of intellect they demand, the perfection of the
portrait is the last word of painting. In truth, the
model that apparently gives the law to the painter,
that imposes upon him the peculiarities of his feat-
ures, the singularity of his coiffure, the cut of his
clothes, his habitual carriage, yet leaves him count-
less liberties. These profoundly personal character-
istics, that must be profoundly treated, may be modi-
fied in a hundred ways ; the ugliness of the face cor-
rected by choosing full-face, three quarters, or profile,
lowering, raising, or turning aside the head, adopting
a pose that hides what is insignificant and makes
prominent what is advantageous, by calling in the aid
of light and its charms, shadow and its mysteries.

Can anything be more difficult than to get the ex-
pression of intelligent life ? But the means of suc-
cess ? Will it be by literal imitation ? If that sufficed,
the best portrait painter would be the photographer.

PAINTING. 231

But who does not know how deceitful is the truth,
that pretends to be infallible, of the photographic
image ? The painter endowed with mind can call
forth the mind of his model, but how can a machine
evoke a soul ? In presence of the human figure, the
photographer, according to the sculptor Preault,
gives us only " the soot of the flame."

Before a being who feels and thinks, everything
ought to be felt and thought, consequently chosen ;
the attitude, the physiognomy, the lines of adjust-
ment, the chiaro 'scuro, the color, the accessories,
even the relative proportion of the frame which may
make the model seem larger or smaller. If the per-
son is of lofty stature, it will be better to narrow
the field above the head so that he will seem to
touch the ceiling of the picture ; if of small size, it
will be indicated clearly enough by the distance left
between the top of the head and the border.

The attitude is one of the grandest means of ex-
pression in the portrait. Much skill is required
that the pose may not seem far-fetched, forced, but
striking, and, at the same time, natural. By repre-
senting Henry VIII. standing and full-face, his
cane in his hand, and one arm hanging down, Hoi
bein has been able to manifest with energy the in-
stincts and appetites of this gross man, of this obese
and voracious brute, who fills his frame to bursting.
This pose displays his round face, small, cruel
mouth, narrow, pinched nostrils, swine's eyes, swol-

232 PAINTING.

len temples, and jaws that by their enormous devel-
opment seem to drag intelligence down into the
region of the viscera. Ever since Holbein's time,
the English school has shone by the variety of its
attitudes. Reynolds displays fine, inventive imagi-
nation in the portrait of the celebrated Dr. Johnson.
With half-closed eye, anxious brow, hands opening
as if about to seize a fleeting thought, he seems
plunged in an ecstasy of meditation, and to revolve
some great problem in the folds of his mind.

For a century, artists have surpassed their predeces-
sors in exaggerating the exceptional, heightening the
accidental, to represent certain strange types, certain
temperaments engendered by the crossing of races
and the current of new thoughts. In our days, In-
gres, in his portrait of Bertin, has, with rare power,
indicated the power of his model, merely by the at-
titude he caught after having observed him for
months. Seated, and loaded down by his embon-
point, he places his two hands, turned inwards, upon
his wide-apart legs, and with his rounded arms seems
to sustain the weight of his corpulency. In this
admirable portrait we find the indelible features of
an individuality that it would be impossible to con-
found with any other; it is full of style in its imita-
tion, because its truth is a typical truth, that is to
say, it is a personification of the higher bourgeoisie
of our times, a class strong, intelligent, and tenacious,
disdainful of what is below and above it, and in
which the pride of the theorist is mingled with the

PAINTING.

233

positivism of the business-man, and the manifest well-
being of fortune acquired by labor. Yet how pro-
foundly individualized is the physiognomy of the
original, not only by the questioning expression of

10TELIN . HL,'fi.EL. SC.

BERTIN. BY INGRES.

the piercing eye, the slight disorder of the hair, the
taper fingers of the puffy hands, but even by the
folds of the vest and coat, whose optical physiognomy
completes the moral physiognomy of the portrait.

234 PAINTING.

The Physiognomy. There is in the individual a
general truth that the painter cannot at the first mo-
ment divine, for it often happens that a coarse man
has a vein of gentleness, and a mild man has fits of
violence. Anxious to seize the unity of the charac
ter through the accidental or misleading expressions,
Van Dyck kept his sitters to dinner, the better to spy
out the moment in which their true physiognomy
should betray itself, in which the natural, driven
away by factitious conventionality, should return on
the gallop. Holbein had reflected upon that, and
looked closely, when he painted that ascetic, mild old
man, whose bony hands, crossed one over the other,
repeat the leanness and sadness already announced
by the withered face, the eyes hollowed by medita-
tion, the sunken cheeks, and thin lips accustomed to
silence. The black cap crowded down over the ears,
the furred pelisse that covers the shoulders, the table
upon which he leans, all aid in showing us a denizen
of the North, who lives in the interior of his house
and of his thoughts. " Who could help loving," says
Paul Mantz, " this grave and gentle face of a thinker
who, we are sure, suffered all the disquietudes of the
sixteenth century, and who, without having the mock-
ing lip of Erasmus, like him saw the old world end,
and the new one begin. These portraits of Holbein
are full of ideas. The human has never been ren-
dered so visible under the mask that covers it."

Lines simple or involved, abrupt or blended to-
gether, light and shadow, adapted to the tempera-

PAINTING.

235

ment of the individual, coloring vigorous or tender,
brilliant or subdued, dress careless or severe, the ac-
cessories, the attributes, the background, these di-
verse elements in the portrait fall within the prov-
ince of the mind. Each of the great masters has
employed them, according to the characteristics of

PORTRAIT BY HOLBEIN.

the persons represented, sometimes according to his
own genius. Leonardo da Vinci veils in loving half-
tints the portrait of " Mona Lisa," the beautiful
woman with the reserved, yet provoking smile, the
magnetic eye. He envelops her in a harmony of a
minor key, that the blending of light and shadow

236 PAJNTJNG.

may correspond to the secret fascination of this coun-
tenance, this voluptuous look. Rembrandt throws
over the commonest nature a mysterious glimmer
that is poetry, the romance of light. Velasquez ex-
presses so perfectly the shade of temperament by
the exquisite truth of local tone, that we discover
without effort the unison between the visible form
and the hidden spirit. Van Dyck and Anthony
More give to all their personages the stamp of
good breeding, or the investiture of nobility. Ru-
bens exalts life in the image of his model ; he seems
to throw into it the circulation of the blood, and
when it is a child or a woman, he lavishes upon it
freshness, youth, and the sun. All Titian's portraits
are imposing. Their beauty attracts, at the same
time their dignity keeps us at a distance. They are
speaking, though silent.

The old distinction between genre and history, or
rather between familiar, anecdotic painting and style,
is then necessary, profound, and must be maintained.
Individual truth suits the one ; the other demands a
more general, a higher truth. Let Teniers individ-
ualize with spirit, and with all the accents of their
grotesque deformity, his peasants, whom Louis Qua-
torze called baboons ; let Van Ostade detail the in-
teresting ugliness of his wandering minstrels, of his
poor, deformed villagers ; let him introduce us, with a
sunbeam, into that little "Village School," where
twenty charming monkeys have each his own fashion

PAINTING. 237

of pouting at work, and dreaming of the hedge-rows;
that is admirable. A charlatan at a fair, a public
fete, a game of chess, a familiar conversation, the
comedies of the household, the little dramas of pri-
vate life, demand only justness of observation and
talent for imitation. All pretension to style would
be unpleasing, out of place.

Very different is the work of the painter, when the
person whose biography he relates is the human race.
The form, gesture, expression, external nature, the
landscape, all are under the control of his thought ;
he is like one who, melting common worn-out
money, stamps it anew and creates with it other spe-
cies of purer metal, higher value. He knows that
in the scales of history, little things are borne down
by the weight of great ones. " It matters not," says
Reynolds, " if Alexander were short of stature, if
Agesilaus were maimed, if Saint Paul were mean in
appearance; in the representation of these heroes
the painter prefers the resemblance of the mind to
that of the body. If, by chance, he has seen a boy
hurling a sling, bite his lip, he will not, like Bernin,
give to the conqueror of Goliath that trivial and acci-
dental expression, thus disobeying the higher laws of
art."

Color, also, has its conventionalities and its dignity,
in the eyes of the painter of style. Sometimes, to
give more severity, he tempers it or reduces it to the
tone of chiaro 'scuro, or, if he finds the harmony too
effeminate, he does not fear to break it by sudden

238 PAINTING.

transitions, bold juxtapositions, that move the spec-
tator as would the staccato notes of martial music.

The great artist is not he who enters our house to
put on our clothes, to conform to our habits, to speak
to us an every-day idiom, and to give us a represen-
tation of ourselves ; the greatest artist is he who
guides us into the region of his own thought, into
the palaces or fields of his own imagination, and who
there, while speaking to us the language of the gods,
while showing us ideal forms and colors, makes us
for a moment believe, by force of the truth in his
falsehoods, that these regions are those in which we
have always lived, these palaces belong to us, these
mountains looked down upon our birth; that this
language is ours, and these forms, these colors, cre-
ated by his genius, are the forms and colors of Na-
ture herself.

i.

ENGRAVING is THE ART OF TRACING IN INTAGLIO

UPON METAL, OR IN RELIEF UPON WOOD, A DRAWING
FROM WHICH IMPRESSIONS CAN BE TAKEN.

To engrave, is to draw by in-
cision upon a hard body, stone,
wood, or metal. This kind of
drawing is very ancient ; we
find many examples of it in
Egyptian hieroglyphics, not to
^•WBSBBB-- speak of the seals that the citi-

zens of Babylon carried upon their persons, and the
ring of Ulysses, upon which a dolphin was engraved.
We have only to look at the ancient coins to see a
type in relief produced by an engraving in intaglio,
and a hollowed area produced by an engraving in
relief. The art of engraving, then, is not a modern
invention, it is only the art of taking impressions
upon paper from an engraving upon wood or metal,
that is of recent origin. In other words, it is the
marriage of engraving with the printing-press.

As there are two kinds of engraving, well defined,
in relief and in intaglio, so there are two kinds of im-

240 ENGRA VI NG.

pressions. Engraving in relief, which is ordina-
rily upon wood, and which we call, for that reason,
xylographic, is a drawing in which the lights are
deeply hollowed, while the shadows and the contour
are in relief. To print a wood engraving, ink is
passed over the surface so as to blacken only the pro-
jecting portions of the wood, and an imprint upon
paper is obtained, a proof, by pressing the sheet
upon the inked surface. Before the invention of
printing, this pressure was obtained by means of a
brush, still used for wall-papers. Thus the proofs of
the "St. Christopher" were made in 1423, which
probably are the oldest impressions of wood engrav-
ing of undisputed date.

Intaglio, generally upon copper or steel, consists
in leaving intact the lighter parts of the drawing, and
hollowing in the plate of metal only the contour and
the shadows. To print such an engraving, one be-
gins by covering the whole plate with ink ; after-
wards it is dried with a tampon of linen or the palm
of the hand, so as to leave ink only in the cuttings,
that is, in the furrows hollowed by the artist. Ap-
plying to the plate a damp paper, under heavy pres-
sure, between two cylinders covered with flannel,
the paper is crowded to the bottom of the cuttings,
where it takes up the ink.

The generic name prints, is given to the images
obtained upon paper by means of pressure. Al-
though every print may be a proof, and every proof
a print, the word is used in a more restricted sense.

ENGRAVING. 241

It signifies trial, when the engraver, to test his work,
prints an impression ; and is employed in a relative
sense in speaking of one print as compared with
another taken from the same plate. We say, for in-
stance, my proof is better than yours. A proof is
clear or muddy, according as the plate was well or
badly dried ; it is gray or pale when the pressure
was insufficient, or when the plate, worn at the sur-
face, begins to lose the fullness or precision of its
black. In a word, the proof is to the print what the
copy is to the book.

If it is true that there exists in Europe no proof
from a wood engraving anterior to the " St. Chris-
topher ; " if it is true that the date 1418 of the " Vir-
gin surrounded by Saints," in the library at Brussels,
may have been changed, the first xylographic print
preceded, by thirty years, the first print made from
an engraving on metal by a Florentine jeweller,
Maso Finiguerra.

Wonderful coincidence ! The invention of en-
graving, which is the printing of the fine arts, was
contemporaneous with that of printing, which is the
engraving of belles-lettres. The means of popular-
izing the works of the artist was born at the same
time with the means of propagating the thoughts of
the poet and the philosopher. In 1452, when Gu-
tenberg and Faust were printing at Mayence their
first Latin Bible, the Florentine, Maso Finiguerra,
created the first prints, taking impressions from a
silver paten he had engraved for the Church of St.

242

ENGRA VJNG.

John Baptist, at Florence. It is important to ex-
plain how he was led to his discovery, and in what
it consisted.

Like all the jewellers of his time, Finiguerra orna-
mented his works, sword-hilts, caskets, patens, cups,
chalices, reliquaries, with patterns engraved in intag-<
lio. These delicate miniature ornaments were called
nielli, from the Latin word nigellum, — black, hence
applied to the engravings made by jewellers. When
the artist had finished his work, he spread over the

ITALIAN NIELLO.
COLLECTION OF M. E.MILE GALICHON.

engraving a black enamel, niello, whose composition
is carefully described by Benvenuto Cellini, in his
treatise upon jewelry. This enamel, filling the cut-
tings of the engraving, made the design visible in
black upon the clear tone of the metal. But as any
retouching was impossible after the melted niello
had been run into the mould, the jeweller, before
proceeding to this last operation, took one or several

ENGRA VING. 243

impressions with clay, to be able to inspect his work
and, if need were, to correct it. Upon the clay the
engraving presented itself in relief and reversed ; if,
for instance, an inscription were traced in the origi-
nal from right to left it would in the impression run
from left to right. Now to see his work as he would
have seen it upon the niello-covered plate, the jewel-
ler poured sulphur over the clay, and, after having
colored with lamp-black the furrows in the sulphur,
he printed a counter proof that replaced the engrav-
ing in its proper position before his eyes.

This method Finiguerra had employed when he
engraved for the church of the Baptist at Florence
one of those patens to which the name paix was
given, because they received the kiss of peace in re-
ligious ceremonies. After having taken, with sul-
phur, two impressions, Finiguerra conceived the idea
of printing one upon the silver plate with damp
paper that he pressed with a roller, and the proof
thus obtained was the first print from an intaglio.

This inestimable relic is preserved in the cabinet
of prints at Paris, where it was exhumed in 1797, by
the Abbe Zani. Fortune kindly giving to an Italian
the discovery of the print, that proves, in spite of
German pretension, the Italian origin of printed en-
graving. Additional information with regard to this
curious historic controversy, is furnished by the two
proofs in sulphur, printed by Finiguerra, that still
exist, one at Genoa in the Durazzo collection, the
other in the British Museum.

244 ENGRA VING.

Nevertheless the invention of Finiguerra, which
was such for Europe, was not new in the world.
We know from the testimony of the Venetian, Marco
Polo, who travelled in China in the thirteenth cen-
tury, that at that time the Mongolian conquerors had
assignats printed upon mulberry-tree paper from
copper plates. The Florentine jeweller only found
again a secret already known in Eastern Asia, where
also from time immemorial they had known how to
print stuffs from engravings in relief. But the Floren-
tine discovery was of incalculable importance : first,
by multiplying the impressions of an original work
the printer spread it through the whole world and in-
sured it a duration that might almost become eter-
nal ; and because the delicacy of the engraving, the
vigor of its shadows, the clearness of its lights, the
depth of its distances, the variety of tones that color
lent it, cannot be caught upon the red background
of the copper, or the sombre one of the wood, and
are brought out only by the whiteness of the paper.
What an instrument of civilization, what a benefit to
the artist, what a source of enjoyment to those that
admire him, and to those who, by means of the en-
graving, will learn to admire him.

II.

THE ART OF THE ENGRAVER IS BOUND BY CERTAIN
GENERAL LAWS, ALTHOUGH THERE EXIST PARTICULAR
CONVENTIONALITIES FOR EACH OF THE DIFFERENT
KINDS OF ENGRAVING.

THE engraving is a drawing made with a steel in-
strument instead of a pen or pencil. If the drawing is
an invention of the engraver, it must be judged as any
other drawing would be. If it is the reproduction
of a work of art, painting, sculpture, architecture,
cameo, coin, medal, vase, ornament, the first quality
of the engraver is fidelity, in the sense that he ought
not only to render the original feature for feature, to
repeat the contour and the relief, but also, and above
all, to preserve the spirit and the aspect of the re-
produced work, to bring out its excellencies and avow
its defects, in fine, to reveal frankly its character.

If a painting is in question, the engraver having at
his disposal, so far as color is concerned, only white
and black, ceases to be a copyist to become a trans-
lator. He translates truly into chiaro 'scuro the col-
oring of the picture, and abstracting the tints gives
only their values. The colors being considered as
spots more or less luminous, more or less sombre,
he engraves yellow drapery, for instance, with lighter

246 ENGRA VJNG.

cuttings and wider spaces than blue drapery, so that
the latter forms in the engraving a darker mass than
the former.

To imitate the perspective of bodies especially in
architecture, the engraver will direct his cuttings to-
wards the point of sight; to imitate aerial perspec-
tive, he will express by delicate work the indecision
of objects the most remote in the picture, and will
reserve the sharp strokes for the parts nearest the
eye. As to the diverse substances, wood, stone,
marble, earth, trees, water, clouds, stuffs, flesh, he
will make them apparent by work that will vary in
the different kinds of engraving.

The two great divisions of this art are intaglio
and relief, but each of these is subdivided. In the
first we have copper-plate, aquafortis, mezzotint, aqua-
tint, imitation of pencilling. In the second, engrav-
ing on wood and upon several plates in chiaro 'scuro
or cameo, whose development has produced colored
engraving.

III.

LINE ENGRAVING.

HOWEVER IMPORTANT IN THE COPPER-PLATE THE
CHOICE AND THE TREATMENT OF THE WORK MAY BE,
THE ENGRAVER SHOULD STRIVE ABOVE EVERYTHING,
BY CORRECT AND EXPRESSIVE DRAWING, TO RENDER
THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MODEL HE WISHES TO

ENGRAVE.

ENGRAVING on copper is,
par excellence, classic, that
which has rendered the most
service in perpetuating the
works of the great masters
arid which itself has pro-
duced the most master-pieces.
It is also called engraving with the burin, because
it consists in cutting the copper with this steel in-
strument which traces there, more or less profoundly,
sharp, regular strokes, firm, but supple enough to
indicate by their direction their projection or atten-
uation, and by their manner of crossing each other,
the material quality of objects, their apparent dis-
tance, their optical effect. To copy the contour with

248 ENGRA VING.

sentiment, to put the light and the shadow properly
in their places, to express the visible nature of sur-
faces, the gradation of distances, the inequality of
reliefs, all that does not suffice to the engraver ; it is
of consequence that the expression should be gotten
by one method of procedure rather than another, and
it is the choice of method that constitutes the narrow
specialty of his art.

A word upon the operations of the copper-plate
engraver, — and we could not speak of it here without
grateful remembrance of the eminent masters, Cala-
matta and Mercuri, who have taught us the laws and
the secrets of their art.

Let us suppose the engraver wishes to reproduce
a half-draped figure. After making a drawing of it,
he traces this drawing upon the copper or steel,
marking by a succession of points, the contour of
the figures, the strongest shadows, even the half-tints.
Then with the graver, he masses the shadows by
means of a succession of cuttings that are called
first, and which, following the projections and depres-
sions of the muscles or folds, become more slender,
and are farther apart near the light, while they are
crowded together and thickened in the shadows. This
first work not sufficing, and often letting the pure
white penetrate even to the black, the engraver blots
out the white by crossing the first lines with more
slender second lines. But that the lessening of these
hatchings may be well graduated, that the execution
may be brilliant and smooth, the artist must several

ENGRA VI NG. 249

times go over the first furrows of the .graver, deep-
ening the cutting. Sometimes instead of crossing
the first, the engraver slips in intercalary lines,
which, allowing the passage of slender threads of
light, suit the imitation of polished, shining bodies.

According as the second lines cross the first ob-
liquely or at right angles, they produce lozenges or
squares that may be cut anew by a third line. All
these crossings form little luminous triangles that
prevent the shadows from growing heavy by preserv-
ing a certain freshness in them. The lozenge, when
oblong, produces a sort of undulation not suitable for
flesh, making it resemble a moired ribbon, but in
drapery it gives the aspect of cloth hot pressed.

Although the cuttings are lessened at the extremi-
ties, the passage from light to shadow would often
be too brusque ; to manage the transition the artist
finishes his cuttings with points which are sometimes
arranged without apparent order, sometimes distrib-
uted with evident symmetry.

Such, in brief, are the methods of the engraver
upon copper. They are reduced, as we see, to the
combination of two very simple elements, the light
represented by. the white of the paper, and the
shadow obtained by hatchings and points.

In reading the annals of engraving we shall dis-
cover the laws of this art : they are engraved upon
brass by the master engravers. We have a striking
proof of the superiority of art over a handicraft
In the early prints, which, in their rudimentary

250

ENGKA I'ING.

simplicity, present no manual skill, no choice in
methods, but nevertheless have been deservedly ad-
mired for four centuries. If we look at the works
of Mantegna, what imposing features, in spite of the
primitive rudeness of the methods, we see in his
bacchanals, his combats of Tritons, and his plates of

TRITON. BY MANTKGNA.

the " Triumph of Caesar." The graver is guided
with savage monotony. The caparisoned elephants

ENGRAVING. 251

bearing torches and candelabra, the Roman soldiers
holding the eagles and the trophies, the musicians
sounding the trumpet, the bulls led to the sacrifice,
the standards, the vases, the litters, all are engraved
in the same way. Short, stiff, and always parallel
hatchings mark the shadows. But how strongly he
accentuates the characteristics by this uniform mode
of procedure. In spite of his unvarying mode of
cutting, how well he varies the expressions, how in-
cisive he is in his rude naivete, how grand in his
stiffness.

But such austerity of means is not enough for
engraving. It ought to be an art apart from pure
drawing. The engraved drawing should be made
more interesting by a certain manner of cutting the

SAINT GEORGE. BY MARTIN SCHOEN.

metal, a manner that is to engraving what touch is to
painting, calligraphy to writing.

252 ENGRAVING.

There are German and Dutch masters, Martin
Schoen, Albert Diirer, Lucas de Leyden, who have
invented and introduced into the art the piquant
truth of proceedings that double the interest of an
engraving. The " Nativity " of Diirer, and the print
of a St. Jerome in his Cell," are of a perfection that
leaves nothing to be desired. Seated before a desk,
St. Jerome is absorbed in the study of the Scriptures.
A bright light enters, through the casement, into the
chamber of the anchoret, and throws the trembling
shadow of the window-frame upon the wall. All the
objects that compose the picture preserve the physi-
ognomy befitting them. The pine of the floor is
rendered with charming truth by cuttings that follow
the veins of the wood, and turn around the knots.
In the lion and fox of the foreground, the fine hair
of the one, and the rough hide of the other, are
plainly indicated. The incisions of the graver run
in the direction required by the perspective, the form
and nature of the objects and their dominant dimen-
sion. A gourd is suspended from the ceiling and
we feel that the surface of the fruit is smooth. The
accessories, in a word, play a very interesting optical
role, perhaps too interesting.

But Diirer failed, if not in knowledge of aerial
perspective, at least in marking well the gradation of
distance between the different planes of the picture.
Lucas de Leyden gave the first instance of it, in in-
dicating by an ever and ever lighter touch the dis-
tance of objects. He puts air into his prints ; many

ENGRAVING. 255

people might breathe in them. The plate upon
which, following a middle-age fable, he has engraved
the " Poet Virgil suspended in a Basket," by a cour-
tesan, presents in the foreground, figures that seem
to be within reach of the hand, while in the back-
ground the basket in which Virgil is hanging from
the window, is rendered by less decisive strokes that
indicate the successive layers of air and the dis-
tance.

With Marc Antonio, who in the atelier of
Raphael works under his eyes, after giving up copy-
ing the original but Teutonic engravings of Albert
Diirer, something new in the art of engraving is
produced. Beauty of execution unites with breadth
of style. The savage and sublime monotony of
Mantegna is followed by a manner elegant and
chaste, varied without being whimsical, imitative
without minutia.

Under the surveillance of Raphael, under the em-
pire of his counsels, Marc Antonio conceives en-
graving as it should be, when attempting to repeat
the works of great masters. He conceives it as a
concise translation that represents the essential, that
indicates everything, says everything, and that, de-
prived of the language of color, insists upon the
supreme beauty of contour, accentuates the char-
acter of the heads, the chosen forms, the proud tour-
nure, the strength or delicacy of the ligaments and
muscles. His manly, sober manner of cutting the
copper, harmonizes wonderfully with the dignity

256 ENGRAVING.

of the designs he interprets. His supple stroke
turns with the muscles and marks the presence of
the bones, the depressions or prominences of the
flesh ; and in reserving broad lights upon the plate,
he attains simple but powerful effects ; obtains in a
small print a grand image.

Marc Antonio is, par excellence, an engraver of
style. But what is style in the art made illustrious
by the Bolognese master?

Style in engraving is the preeminence of drawing
over color, of beauty over richness. I say color, be-
cause the engraver, although reduced to the mono-
chrome effect of black and white, is, nevertheless, in
one sense a colorist. Raphael had inaugurated style
in engraving, Rubens introduced color. He taught
the two Bolswert, Pontius and Wostermann, his en-
gravers, not to neglect the value of local tints, which
are, after all, only notes in the music of chiaro 'scuro.
Cinnabar, for instance, being a more sombre color
then rose, ought to be rendered in the print by
deeper black. It was the last step of progress en-
graving could take, the last resource with which it
could enrich itself. Nothing now hindered the print
from being the equivalent of the picture. Albert
Diirer had learned, by variations in the work, to im-
itate the variety of substances ; Lucas de Leyden
had shown how to indicate aerial perspective ; Marc
Antonio, how the suppleness of the tool may serve
the triumph of the drawing ; the pupils of Rubens
were to show in what manner the effect of a painting

ENGRA VI NG. 259

could be reproduced ; that is, its coloration by means
of light.

Thus our engraver is armed at all points, for
already, in the time of Rubens, all the different
methods of cutting copper had been learned. Dra-
pery, flesh, hair, landscape, sculpture, architecture,
all the objects that can enter into the composition of
a picture, are susceptible of characterization with
the point of the graver.

Drapery. The graver should repeat the woof and
distinguish the material quality of it If it is linen,
the fineness will be indicated by means of lines
closely pressed together, delicate and unique. If it is
cloth, the width of the cutting must be proportioned
to the coarseness of the tissue. The artist will make
one cutting in the direction of the large folds, and
run the other, waving and supple, over the half-tints
that mark the slight depressions. In crossing at
the bottom of the fold, the two cuttings will increase
the vigor of the black, but wherever the fabric turns,
the stroke of the graver should turn and become
slenderer, losing itself at the limits of the contour.

In the case of shining stuffs, like silk or satin, the
graver will imitate the creases by a brusque interrup-
tion of the strokes at the luminous places, and will
imitate the softness of the shadows by slight strokes
apart from the first. These same interlineations may
be used for metals, vases of gold or silver, armor of
polished steel. Edelinck, in his splendid prints after

260 ENGRAVING.

Raphael, Charles Lebrun, and Philip de Champagne
and Drevet in his " Bossuet " after Rigaud, have
reached perfection in the representation of drapery.

Flesh. The artist will take care not to make that
of women and children like that of men. He
chooses for the first smoother cuttings that express
its softness, its delicacy, avoiding the square meshes,
which are suitable for hard substances, and the loz-
enge which is too angular for suavity. Generally
delicate flesh is represented by broken cuttings min-
gled with dots, especially near the lights. These
dots, that should be as round as possible, imitate the
layers of paint, whether employed simply to termi-
nate the more feeble half-tints, or interposed in the
shadows to extinguish the luminous lozenges some-
times placed between the broken cuttings which
then resemble the different sized beads of a rosary ;
the points express still better the tenderness of the
skin and the warmth of life. " The points," says
Abraham Bosse (" Traite des Manieres de Graver en
Taille-douce "), " ought to be arranged almost like the
bricks of a wall ; above all we must maintain order,
for whether the thickness of the varnish deceives, or
from some other cause, it happens that when the
plate has been bitten, in spite of all the regularity
observed they are still badly arranged, and if one
did not correct by going over them again with the
graver, the flesh would seem scabby."

The nude in the faces of men is engraved rather

ENGRAVING. 261

with lengthened points, that, mixed with the cut
tings, mould the flesh but produce an effect less soft,
less feminine than the round points. Models of per
fection in the treatment of flesh are the " Crowning
with Thorns," by Bolswert, after Van Dyck ; the
" Battle of Alexander," by Gerard Audran, after Le
Brun ; the "Rat Poisoner," by Cornelius Vischer;
the portraits of Rembrandt by George Frederick
Schmidt ; the prints of Robert Strange. The move-
ment, the roundness of the muscles, the folds of the
skin, the dimples, the flat surfaces, the palpitation of
the cellular tissue, the warmth of the nude, are admi-
rably imitated.

The Hair. To separate the hairs, to engrave
them one by one, is not the best mode of proceed-
ing. Nanteuil, in his portraits of Turenne and Fou-
quet; Edelinck, in those of Desjardins and de Cham-
pagne, have followed it, it is true, but with modera-
tion. Masson, engraving his famous plates of the
Marshal d' Harcourt, and of " Brisacier," affects to
carry off at the sharp point of the graver, the de-
tached hairs of a wig or a moustache ; and it must be
acknowledged the extreme boldness of the cuttings
produces a sharp, metallic effect. The eminent
artist who has so magnificently engraved the " He-
micycle," of Paul Delaroche, has followed the con-
trary method ; has rendered the hair with the re-
quired lightness, by strokes relatively wide apart,
which, instead of counting the hairs as if they were

262 ENGRA V1NG.

combed with a fine comb, gathers them in little
masses and produces the same illusion to the eye,
because the eye, in the transparency of the whole,
supplies the delicacies of detail. It is then just to
say the artist is always true when he catches the
spirit of things.

Raphael Morghen, in the print of the " Marquis
of Moncade, on horseback," after Van Dyck, wished
to imitate with dots the hair of the animal, and, in
spite of all his address, he has given to these hairs
the appearance of brass wires. Goltzius was more
successful when he engraved the beautiful silk, some-
times soft and long, sometimes frizzed, of the dog,
celebrated among connoisseurs under the name of
" Goltzius's Dog." But Blooteling, in a valuable plate
representing a landscape, and a cavalier on horse-
back, has proved that the skin of a well-groomed
horse can be marvellously engraved, like armor or
satin, by waving and smooth strokes.

Landscape is rarely made by the graver alone ; it
is prepared with aquafortis, but this must be done in
such a way that in some places the rudeness of the
preparation shall disappear, in others be retained.
For earth, stones, knotty tree-trunks, mountains,
rocks, the hatchings should be broken, left off ab-
ruptly, freely crossed in different directions. The
coldness of the rocks, their superficial smoothness,
their fissures, are well imitated by crossings at right
angles ; but the roughness of the bark, the uneven

ENGRA VING. 263

surface of the ground, and of old walls, are expressed
by unequal and short strokes, rude points, that seem
to gnaw the copper, and that engravers call nibbling.
Of course, account must be taken of the interposed
air, of the aerial perspective, by indicating objects
more vaguely in proportion to their remoteness in
the picture.

Water, if it is calm, is represented by cuttings
parallel to the horizon, with interlines and interrup-
tions that indicate its sheen. The form of reflected
objects is repeated by secondary verticals, taking
care to separate the forms of these objects according
as they are near the foreground or remote. If trees
are mirrored in clear water, one will do well to mark
the configuration by a light, undecided contour.

When the waves of the sea are tossed in a marine
view, the first cuttings follow their movement, and
the counter-cuttings run decidedly in lozenges, be-
cause thus one imitates better their transparency, but
here and there may be bold irregularities of the
graver. Balechou, in the " Tempest " of Joseph
Vernet, was admirable in this manner. When the
water falls in cascades, the cutting naturally runs in
the direction of the fall, with insertion of interlines
and abrupt breaking off where it strikes the light
portions.

Clouds are drawn by horizontal strokes. If they are
distant and fade gradually into the sky, care must
be taken that the cutting instead of forming a con-
tour at the extremity of the cloud, should die out

264 ENGRA VING.

there. If the clouds are agitated, tempestuous, the
graver must figure the swelling and the agitation,
but not be everywhere bellied out. The cross-cut-
tings will be in pointed lozenges lowered by a third
cutting, because thus transparency and a sort of
movement can be given ; but the flaky vaporousness
will be secured by light points. In every case the
first cuttings ought to dominate the second. Callot,
La Belle and others, have used waved lines for
clouds ; it is an error ; the cloud engraved by circular
lines resembles a mass of wool or tow.

As to the foliage of trees, the engraver masses the
middle parts and represents in detail only the ex-
tremities, always according to the character of the
species. His instrument flows over the branches of
the willow, bristles on the twigs of the oak, and di-
lates upon the broad leaves of the plane-tree. The
landscape-engraver could not study finer prints than
those of Woolett, which revive the solemn aspect of
the Arcadian fields of Claude, those of Baudet that
reproduce the majestic landscapes of Poussin, and
those of Vivares, of Phillippe le Bas, d'Aliamet,
Surugue, and of Dupuis after the savage or fairy
scenes of Guaspre, Berghem, Karel Dujardin, Wat-
te au.

Architecture. Let the hand of the engraver be
guided by the sentiment of perspective, thus the
stroke of his instrument will contribute to the opti-
cal illusion; this, first of all, must be observed. The

ENGRA VJNG. 265

cuttings that cover the retreating surfaces, ought to
approach each other and converge at the point of
sight; but the increase of tone thus produced, is
balanced by the interlines placed where the cuttings,
more widely separated, would be relatively too clear.
In general, it is fitting that the architecture of the
picture should be engraved in the direction of the
greatest dimension, that the columns, for instance,,
should be shaded by perpendicular cuttings. The
columns in fact perform their office of support only
by virtue of their vertical elevation. However, as
architecture, in the representations of the painter, is
usually only an object of secondary decoration, a
foundation subordinated to the figures, it is impor-
tant that the engraver should harmonize the lights
and shadows by avoiding cuttings too strongly ac-
centuated. But of all the hatchings the engraver
uses, the verticals are those that strike the eye, espe-
cially if they are wide apart. The artist then will
keep them pressed together that the eye may be
more occupied with the object itself than with that
which covers it. In running through the " Life of
St. Bruno," in the fine prints of Chauveau after
Lesueur, we see how architecture may in engraving
preserve its interest, without necessarily attracting at-
tention, without diverting it, so true is it that senti-
ment may be displayed even in the treatment of
stones. The monotonous stroke of the graver seems
to glide tranquilly over the walls of the monastery.
The scenes of the cloister, the monks at prayer, the

266 ENGRA VI NG.

cenobites visited in slumber by celestial visions, de-
tach themselves from the architectural foundation,
whose pilasters, capitals, archivolts, mouldings are
portrayed modestly, piously, noiselessly.

These many varieties in the art of engraving on
copper, have an importance, a charm of their own,
but the beauty of design must never yield to beauty
of execution ; the character of the model must have
precedence over the delicacy of the work. Often
without troubling themselves about fixed rules, en-
gravers who were also painters, have executed master-
pieces. Look at the portraits of Jansenius, of Saint
Cyran ; of Jean Morin, after Phillippe de Cham-
pagne ; especially his incomparable plate of " Benti-
voglio," in which he equals Van Dyck ; the flesh is
rendered with astonishing life and vigor, by a min-
gling of the cuttings of the graver with the bitings
of aquafortis, and the free accents of a point, bold,
irregular, expressive. On the other hand, Jonas Suy-
derhoef neglected classic cutting to paint his prints
by biting, scratching the copper the better to accent
the reliefs of Rembrandt, the touch of Ostade, the
abrupt manner and the lively flat surfaces of Hals.

Such infractions of received methods are worth
more than the prodigious dexterity of a Goltzius,
when it degenerates into fantastic elegance, affecta-
tion. In abusing the excellent principle of envelop-
ing strokes, Goltzius arrives at effects most contrary
to his aim. By twisting the muscles in nude figures,
he obtains, not the delicacy of flesh, but the aspect of

ENGRAVING. 267

metal. In his " Fates," the legs resemble cylinders,
because the graver has twice gone over the round-
ness ; in his " Venus," the breasts are like balls of
steel, because the second cutting instead of deepen-
ing the shadow, curves like the first around the
form.

Goltzius, it is true, had sometimes a delicacy imi-
tated from Edelinck ; his first cutting after having
dominated in the rendering of a large muscle or fold,
resumes the second role, and is used only to augment
the tone ; while the second, that at first had served
only to increase the black, becomes in its turn domi-
nant. We can, then, in studying the work of Golt-
zius, find in it fine methods and dangerous errors ;
but what, above all, we learn in it, and should not
forget, is that the copper-plate engraver must always
sacrifice the puerile ostentation of the handicraft to
the serious dignity of art.

IV.
AQUAFORTIS ENGRAVING.

ENGRAVING WITH AQUAFORTIS, WHEN IT is NOT A

PREPARATION FOR COPPER, OUGHT GENERALLY TO BE
EXECUTED WITHOUT APPARENT REGULARITY, WITH
FREE STROKES RARELY CROSSED, WHICH NEVER COVER-
ING THE WHOLE PLATE, LEAVE A ROLE FOR THE
WHITENESS OF THE PAPER.

EXAMINING once a portfolio of engravings with
an excellent landscapist, he said, " Painters make
pictures upon their good and bad days, but one
uses aquafortis only upon the good days." By an
aquafortis is understood, among artists, a composi-
tion conceived in a happy moment, engraved as it
is invented, whose execution is rapid, facile, without
preparation, familiar as conversation, piquant as a
stroke of wit. The print is not a translation of
impressions, it is an original work. The artist
himself writes upon it his thought and his memo-
ries. But how can he be at the same time the
designer of his engraving, and the engraver of his
design ?

He takes a smooth plate of copper and warms it

ENGRAVING. 269

over a brasier. Heated to a certain degree, he
passes over it a stick of varnish, that melts at once,
and is spread equally over the plate with a tampon.
Then the varnish is blackened in the smoke of a
lamp ; when cooled, he draws with a steel point upon
the black foundation, strokes as free as those of the
pen or pencil. These strokes, taking away the var-
nish, uncover the metal they had scratched, so that,
the operation finished, we see. a red drawing upon a
black plate.

Now to give the strokes of the drawing the de-
sired depth, he begins by surrounding it with a little
dyke of wax, that he melts by passing over it a
heated iron, so as to solder the rampart and prevent
all infiltration. The drawing being thus at the
bottom of a basin, the engraver pours in a quantity
of aquafortis and allows the corrosive to bite, that
is, to deepen the strokes of the point, a longer or
shorter time, according to the effect he wishes to
obtain. The acid having no power upon the var-
nish, acts only upon the portions of the metal left
naked by the point. Then the wax is removed, the
varnish rubbed off with rags dipped in oil, and the
copper dried represents in intaglio, a design from
which prints can be taken.

For a long time this method of engraving, so
simple, so rapid, had been in use among armorers
for damaskeening. We do not know exactly when
it was applied for the first time to the execution of
prints ; but one of the oldest aquafortis is a " Saint

270 ENGRAVING.

Jerome," by Albert Diirer in 1512; it is the print in
which the anchoret is represented half-naked in a
rocky, desert landscape. Once known in the ateliers,
it attracted painters, and during the sixteenth century
was practiced in Germany, the Low Countries, and
in Italy. There we see Parmesan drawing upon cop-
per, light, delicate sketches, slender figures, proud
and elegant; but these were only the gossip of the
point, thoughts or rather phrases without connec-
tion, abandoned in the condition of sketches. Aqua-
fortis attained its full expression, its value, its color,
in the seventeenth century. Rembrandt was its in-
ventor, its poet, its Shakespeare. It was he who
made of a simple method an art.

Enlightening this black plate with his genius, he
made it scintillate with all the phenomena of light ;
he knew how to trace upon it all the gradations of
shadow. Before him no one had thought of destroy-
ing in places the transparency of the paper, as if
layers of paint had been washed over it. Rem-
brandt obtained this effect, either by putting on the
aquafortis itself with a brush, or by using the imper-
ceptible shavings that the point of the graver had
taken off in scratching the copper. These shavings
retain the black, and give to the impression the most
delicate and varied half-tints. Colored by these, the
print under the hand of Rembrandt becomes a sort
of picture painted with aquafortis, for he tones down
certain portions of the engraving, lulls the light to
sleep, and brings silence into it. Thence those mys-

ENGRA VING.

271

terious effects in the midst of which he shows us an
old man plunged into nocturnal shadows, or the dead
Christ descending into the night of the tomb.

FRYTNC, FISH
AN ETCHING. BY REMBRANDT.

Thus after Rembrandt appeared, aquafortis was
transformed, enriched with resources, to prove to us,
by the example of this great master himself, that the

272 ENGRAVING.

artifices of the trade, the little secrets, the recipes.
are subordinate to the intentions, to the genius of
the designer, much more in aquafortis than in cop-
per-plate engraving. " In the prints of Rembrandt,"
says a skillful critic, — Henri Delaborde, — "one is
more touched by the mysterious meaning of these
impassioned reveries, than by the form under which
they appear. In the " Christ Healing the Sick," the
11 Ecce Homo," the " Resurrection of Lazarus," and
many other similar chefs-cfceuvre^ who could blame
the want of beauty of the types, or the strangeness
of the arrangement? He alone who would begin
by examining with a magnifying glass the execution
of the ray of light in the " Disciples of Emmaus."
Rembrandt has, so to say, an immaterial manner.
Sometimes he touches, strikes the copper as it were
by chance, sometimes proceeds by delicate cuttings ;
he interrupts in the light the stroke that marks the
contour, to make it more energetic in the shadow, or
reverses this method. He uses instruments as Bos-
suet used words, subjecting them to his thought, con-
straining them to express it, without preoccupation
of their end, their subtlety. Like him, he composes
an eloquent and magical style with the most diverse
elements, the familiar and the pompous, the vulgar
and the heroic, and from this mixture results the ad-
mirable harmony of the whole.''

Such as Rembrandt conceived it, such as the other
Dutch painters, Pierre de Laar, Paul Potter, Ruys-
dael, Berghem, Karel Dujardin, Stoop, Van de Velde

ENGRAVING. 273

Ostade, practiced it, aquafortis engraving could not
have flourished in the times of the first great mas-
ters, for it is hardly compatible with style. Marc
Antonio, when he engraved the "Judgment of
Paris," after Raphael, or the " Climbers " of Michael
Angelo, did not foresee this kind of engraving,
would not have comprehended it. What a difference
between them ! As the graver with its regular step,
its methodic elegance, befits solemn compositions,
ideal figures and the nude, so aquafortis in its ca-
pricious march, suits familiar or rustic things, savage
landscapes, picturesque ruins, and the episodes al-
ways new, of the struggle ever going on under our
eyes between light and shadow. The graver renders
by slow strokes the chefs-d'oeuvre of sculpture and
monumental painting; the aquafortis recalls the pass-
ing incidents, and the varied phenomena of real
life, or the fancies of a day. The graver, in a word,
corresponds to the majesty of art and the severe
eloquence of drawing; the aquafortis represents im-
provisation, liberty, and color. Under the point
of* Van Ostade it interests us in the disorder of a
poor, rustic house, the adventures of the tap-room,
the ugliness of a peasant and his gossip ; in the
work of Ruysdael it communicates to us the senti-
ment of melancholy that wooded solitudes inspire in
dreamers ; upon the copper of Thomas Wyck, of
Karel Dujardin, it lends a singular charm to the fig-
ure of a beggar asking alms, to the mules trotting
along the highway shaking their bells. Aquafortis

18

274

ENGRA VING.

engraving attaches itself from choice to all that is
irregular, fantastic, unfinished, or in ruins. It loves to
render the falling plaster of an old wall, the dilapida-

A PEASANT PAYING HIS SCOT.
ETCHING OF OSTADK.

tion of a well from which a servant is drawing water,
the decaying roof of a grange where the pigeons
are nesting, the overturned cart on which the chick-
ens have perched, and even the dung-heap of the

ENGRAVING. 275

barnyard in which the swine are wallowing. But
O, miracle of art; in its kingdom are neither un-
clean beasts, nor odious monsters, nor unhealthy ex-
halations, nor fetid odors. Through it all is puri-
fied, and painful sensations become agreeable senti-
ments ; by means of it the insignificant attracts us,
the useless captivates, ugliness can please, the igno-
ble even, though unpardonable, is pardoned.

In the French School one artist has united aqua-
fortis to style — Claude Lorraine. It is . true his
genius manifested itself only in landscape. But by
a sublime transposition he brought the ideal down
into material things ; the landscapes he has engraved
are astonishing, without being fantastic ; attractive,
without disorder. The firmament is pure, the earth
smiling, and if we see the sea, it is calm, radiant,
hardly moving under the evening breeze. Even
when, in the prints of Claude, the aquafortis gnaws
the acanthus leaves of the broken column or the re-
mains of a ruined bridge, the ideal dominates the
picturesque.

Another famous example of the introduction of
style by means of aquafortis, is the work of Piranesi.
Who would believe that a familiar engraving could
produce the prints of this engraver without a peer,
without a possible imitator. Here also we must
recognize the subordination of the method to the
sentiment. Like the ploughshare, the point of Pira-
nesi goes over the field of his plate, and torrents of
aquafortis dig furrows in it, into which the shadows

2 76 ENGRA VING.

precipitate themselves. His print is traversed by
the sun, and broad beams perform the office of half-
tints. He exaggerates the solemn, even to the terri-
ble. He makes the antique monuments of Rome
more imposing in their image than the reality. The
Pantheon of Agrippa, the temple of Antonine, the
colossi of the Quirinal, the mole of Hadrian, the
debris of the Forum, seem vaster in the folios of
Piranesi than in the eternal city. This unique en-
graver amplifies and elevates all that he touches.
In reducing the Coliseum he aggrandizes it. Upon
his plates the light vibrates, the shadows move, the
stones become animated, and Roman grandeur seems
immense. One would say the fragments of Trajan's
column, the tympanum of the arch of triumph, the
frieze, the trophies, have left their colossal imprint
upon his plates. In his hand, aquafortis has the
manner of Michael Angelo.

Whatever may be the authority of example in
these exceptional works, it is not less true that aqua-
fortis engraving does not lend itself readily to works
of large size. Rembrandt himself when he went
beyond the quarto, retouched his plate with the
graver, thus taking away the character of inspira-
tion. To finish an aquafortis seems a contradiction
in terms. Ostade going over his engravings with
the dry point ', that is upon the naked copper and dry,
has generally made them heavy and dark. The
prints of Van Dyck, especially his portraits of ar-
tists, before the graver has touched them, are exquis-

ENGRAVING. 277

ite works; sketches, but perfect. Sneyders, Frar^ois
Franck, Breughel, Vostermann, De Vos, and others
are living; they move, speak to you, call you, stretch
out the hand to you. With a few strokes of the
steel, Van Dyck has indicated the boniness of the
brow, the depression of the temples, the projection
of the cheek-bones, the cartilage of the nose, the flat
parts of the cheek and chin. Two strokes more, a
few dots here and there, a little nibbling, and you
touch the beautiful, elegant hands, with their long
fingers and delicate joints. You seem to feel the
moisture of life that the paper imbibes. But what
has become of these marvellous works when the
artisans of Antwerp have finished them with the
graver? What heaviness! what coldness ! what effac-
ing of all the accents of life !

Unless you wish, like Rembrandt, to obtain a mys-
terious effect, the whole plate must not be covered.
In general, plates intended for biting ought to be
prepared with little work, in view of the whiteness
of the background. We must, as the engravers
say, let the paper work. Tiepolo, Canaletti, Thomas
Wyck, have allowed it to appear even in the shad-
ows, by avoiding cross-cuttings, reaching the greatest
vigor by repeated bitings. They have thus obtained
a certain shimmering of silver light that enchants
the eye. But what piquant, spirituelle effects do we
not owe to the rapid, but incisive point of Callot
Without going back so far, the aquafortis of some
of our contemporaries, above all, those of Charles

278 ENGRAV1XG.

Jacque, may serve as models to young engravers in
the art of lighting up the print by economizing the
bitings, filling it without stifling, being charming at
little expense, that is to say in constant collaboration
with the light of the paper.

V.

MEZZOTINT.

MEZZOTINTS LACKING FIRMNESS, THE ENGRAVER MUST
CORRECT THEIR SOFTNESS, AND UNLESS A VAPOROUS
EFFECT IS TO BE GIVEN, MUST BRING OUT THE LIGHTS
WITH A FIRM, RESOLUTE HAND.

THE mezzotinter proceeds in a manner the reverse
of that of the copper-plate or aquafortis engraver.
They distribute black upon a white surface ; he white
upon a black one. They use a graver or a point to
make lines and shadows upon a polished plate that
represents the clear portions, he a scratching-knife
and scraper to bring back lights upon a blackened
plate that represents the shadows.

The graining of the plate is obtained by means
of the berceau. This is a convex instrument, striated
like a fine grater. It is passed over the copper with
an oscillatory movement, so that the plate bitten by
the teeth of the grater, is covered with slight asperi-
ties that form the graining. If a plate prepared in
this way is put under pressure, one gets a proof cov-
ered with a uniform velvety black. This black is
the basis upon which the engraver is to work.

280 ENGKA

After having counter-drawn his design, he puts in
the half-tints and the lights, using more or less the
grain of the plate, or scratching it clean with the
scraper. These lights, half-tints and blacks that the
graining forms, give the desired effect of chiaro
'scuro. The art of the engraver consists, not in en-
graving the copper, but in adroitly destroying what
the berceau had engraved upon it.

Horace Walpole attributes the invention of the
mezzotint to the nephew of Charles I., Prince Ru-
pert, who lost the battle of Marston Moor. " This
prince," says Walpole, " who had retired to Brussels
after the tragic death of his uncle, going out one
morning, noticed a sentinel rubbing his gun ' What
are you doing ? ' asked the prince. The soldier re-
plied that the dew that had fallen during the night
had rusted his gun, and he was scraping and cleaning
it. The prince looking at it closely, thought he saw
something like a figure stamped on the barrel, with
innumerable little holes close to each other, like
damaskeening on silver or gold, of which a part was
already engraved. The genius fertile in resources
drew from this simple incident the conception of
the mezzotint. From what he had seen, the prince
concluded that one could produce upon a plate of
copper fine asperities that would give to the impres-
sion a black proof, scratching which, one could easily
get the half-tints and the lights. He communicated
this idea to the painter, Wallerant Vaillant, and to-
gether they proceeded to experiment."

ENGRAVING. 281

From the recital of Walpole. it would seem that
Prince Rupert invented the mezzotint after the death
of his uncle, necessarily after 1649, but this assertion
is falsified by the fact that in 1643 an officer in the
service of Hesse Cassel, Louis de Siegen, had pub-
lished a portrait-bust of the landgravine, Amelie
Elizabeth, engraved in mezzotint. Leon de Laborde
has established from the testimony of Rupert him-
self, and the letters of Siegen, that the latter was the
inventor of mezzotint and the author of the first en-
graving in this style. But if Prince Rupert were
not the inventor, he brought it to perfection in the
print of the " Executioner of St. John," after Ribera.
From this fine print we learn what can be accom-
plished by mezzotint when the hand of a master cor-
rects its softness, its cottony appearance, by boldness in
bringing out the lights, brusqueness in transition, and
firmness in using the scraper. Thus treated, mezzo-
tint becomes like a painting, because to the softness
of broad and well united shadows, it adds the free
touch, the vigorous relief, that belong only to painters.
These fine effects the graver cannot easily attain, be-
cause it digs in the metal only the blacks, and con-
tents itself with managing the lights instead of ap-
plying them resolutely as in the mezzotint, by ener-
getic strokes of the scraper.

The mezzotint is more suitable than any other
style of engraving to represent phantoms, incanta-
tions, artificial lights like those of the lamp, torches,,
fire, all the drama of conflagrations, all the effects of
night.

282 ENGRAVING.

Gerard de Lairesse says it is also most fitting for
plants, fruits, flowers, vases of gold or silver, armor.
But to us it seems that objects distinguished by the
rich variety of their substances and colors, that pre-
sent aspects so diverse, can be better rendered by the
graver. Classic engraving has invented a thousand
ingenious ways of characterizing objects by the cut-
ting of the copper, metallic bodies as well as the
satiny surface of flowers or the spines of a stem ;
the down of a peach as well as the rough shell of
a nut, or the rind of a lemon. But even in the hands
of a master like Richard Earlom, mezzotint has but
one way to express all these different surfaces, and
can reproduce them with only uniform softness.

Another fault inherent in this style of engraving,
is that the plates are soon worn. The English, who
have excelled in it, say they get scarcely more than
a hundred good impressions from a plate, the rub-
bing of the hand and the press quickly blunting the
graining upon the surface of the copper. The first
impressions are not the best, are too hard and black ;
the finest are between the fortieth and sixtieth ; the
graining is then softened, but has not lost strength.1

In France, the mezzotint was never a favorite with
artists or the public. Her school, rarely led away by
imagination, did not give itself up to sombre fan-
tasies, Rembrandt effects. Before the advent of ro-
manticism, French art had nothing like the Biblical

1 Plates of copper or steel may be covered with a layer of metal by a
galvanic process, so that about a thousand impressions of equal excel-
lence may be taken.

ENGRAVING. 283

inventions of Martin, the magic lantern, and fairy
scenes that borrow from the mezzotint a certain
vague poetry, like that of dreams. The precision of
the graver, the spirit of aquafortis, suit it better.

If mezzotint does not imitate well solid and hard
bodies, it is valuable for rich hangings, satin, velvet,
and for flesh. By the depth of its shadows, the
union of their masses, its blended half-tints, it adapts
itself marvellously to the fantastic compositions of
Bramer and Rembrandt, to the night scenes of
Schalken and Gerard Dow, and to the moonlight
effects of the melancholy Elzheimer.

There is a kind of engraving that resembles mez-
zotint and yet differs from it, — aquatint, — an inven-
tion of a French painter, Jean Baptiste Leprince, in
1760. After tracing with the point the contour of
objects, the plate is covered with a layer of powdered
rosin, or salt, or fine sand; across this aquafortis is
passed, which thus sifted, produces on the plate a
uniform graining, suitable for imitations of aquarelles
in India ink, sepia, or umber. The shadows seem
made with the brush.

The aquatint was skilfully managed by the inven-
tor, whose first prints passed for aquarelles. Facile,
rapid, it has been used to reproduce the works of
an eminently popular artist, Horace Vernet, whose
prompt, impatient march would have wearied a le-
gion of copper-plate engravers.

The Spaniard Goya, used the aquatint success-
fully, making it an element of expression. In his

284 ENGRAVING.

" Misfortunes of War," and " Caprices," it contrib-
utes to the physiognomy of things. Here it veils a
portion of the print and adds piquancy to the satire
upon manners, by leaving corruptions more profound
to be divined. There it spreads damp shadows over
the tragic scenes of the invasion, and covers them
with a mystery that augments their horror. Some
of his prints seem, not washed with aquafortis, but
bathed in blood. Urged by fever, moved to indigna-
tion, his hand translates in haste what is present to
the eyes of his imagination or his memory; one
would say ' twas a Velasquez intoxicated with fury,
who had borrowed for a day the acids of Rembrandt
and his genius.

Beside this style of engraving is placed the imi-
tation of pencilling, the honor of whose invention,
about 1756, is disputed by Fran9ois and Demarteau,
and which Louis Bonnet applied to the imitation of
pastel by combining differently colored plates.

The pencilling is imitated with a little instrument
called a roulette, with a toothed wheel, that, passing
over the copper, produces points resembling crayon
hatchings. This instrument, used in jewelry, was
applied to engraving first in 1650 by Lutma, son of
the jeweller whom Rembrandt has immortalized in
an aquafortis portrait of the rarest beauty. But in-
stead of using the tool with the hand, Lutma struck
in the teeth with the hammer; hence the engraving
was called opus mallei.

There is a distinction to be observed between the

ENGRAVING. 285

pencil-manner and t\\e pointille, which is the art of
modelling with points more or less widely apart, that
indicate the delicacy of flesh, its morbidezza. At the
beginning of the sixteenth century, a Paduan artist
interpreted in this manner the paintings of Giorgi-
one. But while this admirably suits the light and
color of Giorgione, it is misplaced and powerless to
express the superior qualities of Mantegna or any
other painter of severe style.

Pointing is a kind of engraving very ancient, so
true is it that in all inventions, great or small, there
is always some one who preceded the inventor.

VI.

WOOD ENGRAVING.

ENGRAVING UPON WOOD, INCAPABLE OF PRODUCING
THE DELICATE SHADINGS OF COPPER-PLATE, SUITS SERI-
OUS WORKS, WHICH, BY THE TERSENESS OF THEIR EX-
PRESSION, LEND GRANDEUR EVEN TO WORKS OF SMALL

SIZE.

IT is not to the en-
graver, it is to the de-
signer upon wood the
principle just enuncia-
ted is addressed. What
is the role of the xylo-
graph ? He is scrupu-
lously to respect the
drawing traced for him
upon a piece of wood,
and hollow more or
less profoundly all that
is not this drawing.
Formerly, wood-engraving was called tailledepargne;
it consisted in saving all the strokes of which the im-
age to be put in relief was formed.

ENGRAVING. 287

It would seem that such work left to the engraver
no liberty of interpretation, that he must resign him-
self to passive obedience. But his task is not purely
mechanical.

To obey the sentiment of another, especially in
works often of exquisite delicacy, one must have the
faculty of feeling. Wherever man puts his hand, we
recognize the trace of his mind. This is so true,
that the same drawing may become unctuous or dry,
colored or pale, as the tool of the engraver shall
have hollowed it discreetly or rigorously, as he shall
more or less have spared it That is, in cutting the
wood so as to put each stroke of the designer in
relief between two depressions, the engraver may
have taken something from the edges of the stroke,
but were it only so much as a hair's breadth, it might
suffice to give a sad, arid, cold aspect to the warmest
drawing.

There is, then, room for sentiment on the part of the
wood-engraver even when everything has been indica-
ted, fixed for him. With more reason may he become
an artist when the designer has left him a choice, for
it sometimes happens that the drawing given to the
engraver is made by a painter, who, not knowing
how to trace line by line the forms of his thought,
or not wishing to take the trouble, has only ex-
pressed it in mass. The work is then abandoned to
the engraver. He must render the chiaro 'scuro by
a cutting that seems to him more expressive than
another; must calculate the width of his strokes

288 ENGRAVING.

make them simple or crossed, follow the evolutions
indicative of the object represented ; attenuate the
strokes, interrupt them or finish them by points
lighter and lighter as he recedes from the fore-
ground, or draws near the light. In such cases the
wood-engraver becomes an artist with the same title
as the copper-plate engraver.

Glancing at the oldest prints, we see that drawing
upon wood was coarse and rude, but in the rudeness
of its rapid work it was on the road to the grandeur
and true style demanded by wood engraving. In
the first xylographic books, the " Bible of the Poor,"
and the " History of the Virgin," we notice a naivete
that is not without attraction and a lively sentiment
of reality, joined to a subtle and mystical spirit ; in
a word, we recognize the influence of Van Eyck.
The thought of the master is translated by a sim-
plicity of means that, rudimentary as it is, shows,
nevertheless, a beginning of expression. These books,
however, were printed before 1454, at least accord-
ing to the dictum of a very competent author — Fir-
min Didot (" Essai sur 1'Histoire de la Gravure sur
Bois " ), and his opinion is strengthened by the fact
that these works, properly speaking, are xylographic
books. We understand by this word, in its restricted
sense, books in which the picture and the text were
engraved upon one plate, and the impression taken
with a brush ; books that preceded press-printing
the first specimen of which (" Les Lettres d'lndul-
gence") dates from 1454.

FROM THE LIFE OF THF. VIROtN. ALBERT Dt'lRER.

WOOD ENGRAVING. 291

When Albert Durer appears, wood engraving
suddenly rises to perfection without going beyond
its primitive condition of simplicity. Traced with
breadth and decision, the drawings of Durer teach
us the concise, vigorous manner demanded by this
kind of work. He whose graver was so delicate
when cutting copper, who lingered over the slightest
details, was transformed in drawing upon wood, and
renouncing secondary half-tints, fine transitions, he
composed and saw en grand; distributed broad lights,
produced imposing effects, to be taken in at a distance,
and to impress themselves strongly upon the memory.

The fantastic and terrible prints of the "Apoca-
lypse" ; the hundred and thirty-five plates upon which
unfolds itself so magnificently the triumphal march
of the Emperor Maximilian ; the two series that
represent the " Passion of Christ," and that " Life of
the Virgin," in which the grace of costumes, the life
of countenances, and even their delicacy is united to
sobriety of work, and the large works ordered by
Maximilian of Burgmair and Schauffelein, are and
will remain specimens of high art applied to xylog-
raphy. But these prints of extraordinary, often co-
lossal size, could be rarely used, being suitable only
for the ornamentation of the partitions of a vestibule,
or the walls of a gallery or palace. Wood engrav-
ing seems above all suitable for the illustration of
books ; the great painter, Holbein, gave admirable
models of it, models that have not been surpassed.

In frames smaller than the palm of the hand, often

292 WOOD ENGRAVING.

but an inch square, were introduced pictures, some-
times historical, sometimes familiar, sometimes rising
to the height of tragic symbolism ; real pictures with
their architecture, their landscapes, their background,
their distances, their accessories. The same sheet
of paper was to contain the ideas of an eminent
mind and the work of a superior artist. The " Dia-
logues " of Lucian, the "Adagia" of Erasmus, the
"Utopia" of Thomas More, the Treatises of St
Augustine, the Epistles of St. Paul, the Bible, are
decorated with magnificent frontispieces in which
figure the personages of pagan antiquity and of the
Scriptures ; gods, sages, heroes, Hercules and Cer-
berus, Apollo pursuing Daphne, Solomon, Socrates,
Pythagoras, Curtius leaping into the chasm, Scaevola
holding his hand in the kindled brasier, Judi.h killing
Holofernes, Cleopatra slaying herself. Sphinxes, si-
rens, satyrs, troops of tritons and children guiding
the car of Neptune, a band of peasants chasing a
thieving fox, a swarm of Cupids playing with gar-
lands or masks, frame these frontispieces that pre-
pare the mind of the reader and lure him on, giving
a body to thought by showing the invisible. Some-
times the frame of the title is a triumphal arch un-
der which stands the figure of Erasmus, a statuesque
effigy, an apotheosis.

Hardly has the reader crossed the threshold of the
first page, before his eye is arrested by singular, some-
times fantastic images. The cold letters of the al-
phabet, that begin the different chapters of the book,

Corpora
plancjciteaduiuumpifla ttibdla dabit.

WO OD ENGRA VfNG. 295

are embellished with arabesques, flourish in gardens,
move in lively figures. Within the microscopic di-
mensions of a letter, Holbein has represented the
drama of Death, twenty-four times repeated.

" In the diminutive subjects of his alphabets/' says
Renouvier, " it seems that the narrowing of the field
has only spurred on the artist, such life and expres-
sion does he display. See in the Y of the " Alphabet
of Death," the skeleton, with a superb movement,
striding over the cradle, lifting with both hands the
babe from beside the terrified mother. The scene is
less than an inch square ; but if Michael Angelo had
had a block two yards long, he could not have been
grander, more terrible."

After having exercised his verve upon this funereal
theme, that fed the terrors of the Middle Ages, Hol-
bein has resumed it in his famous prints of the
" Dance of D,eath," which are, with the figures of
the Bible (" Icones veteris Testamenti)," the chefs
cCceuvre of wood engraving. Nothing can be more
moving, more vivid than these images, always varied
and always similar, of Death triumphant. We pene-
trate with him first into Eden, where begins with
the original sin the moral death of the human race ;
afterwards into homes the most diverse ; the labora-
tory of the alchemist, the cabinet of the astrologer,
the hut of the miser, the alcove of a dreaming duch-
ess. In this way tragedy familiarizes itself in genre
pictures and better possesses itself of the reader. It
is remarkable that the greater number of the persons

296

WOOD ENGRAVJNG.

surprised by Death are calmly resigned to their fate.
The captain defends himself from habit ; the beg-
ging friar, the prince robed in ermine, the abbess and
the abbot, also resist. The last, a sated and plethoric
Vitellius of the cloister, repulses Death, who, dan-
cing and grinning, has put on the Abbot's mitre, and
bears on his shoulder the crucifix of the dying man.

IK GROUND. THE PEDDLER.

FROM HOLBEIN'S " DANCE OF DEATH."

A striking feature in this series of engraved com-
positions is the malicious, ironical, often facetious
character stamped upon Death. Here he strikes
with his wand the tambourine before the wedding
procession, there he takes the role of a chambermaid,
and clasps around the neck of a pretty countess a
necklace of bones. Farther on he stops the peddler

WO On ENGRAVING. 297

loaded with his basket, or pulls off the hat of a car-
dinal who is selling indulgences. Sinister in his car-
nival disguises, sometimes he puts on the accoutre-
ments of Folly to mislead a queen ; sometimes an un-
expected guest, in the garb of a cup-bearer, he pours
the deadly beverage for a king. Now he puts on
the deacon's stole to interrupt the sermon of the
preacher ; now that of the sacristan, with bell and
lantern, to guide the convoy of the priest himself
bearing the viaticum to the dying, or he takes the
place of the dog of the blind man,, who, groping to-
wards the tomb, trembles lest he should make a false
step. Here Death has not the horrible grin ; he is
serious, pitiful. See the resigned sadness of the poor
husbandman, who, pushing the plough before him, is
suddenly assisted by a plough-boy who is Death.
How touching is this scene that nature frames with
such naive grace, lighted up by the sun sinking to
the horizon behind the tower of the village-church.

All this is rendered by strokes never crossed, with a
delicate graver varied in its movements, but always
elementary in its methods, always laconic. The
wrinkles of the eye, the muscles of the mouth, the
furrows made by fear or hollowed by life, the charac-
ter of the hair, embonpoint, emaciation ; all are indi-
cated by a firm, decided stroke, and although the
softening of transitions is incompatible with the
smallness of the frame, the expression never be-
comes a grimace. As to the landscape, the architec-
tural background, the accessories, the sentiment of

298 WOOD ENGRAVING.

linear perspective in the management of the hatch*
ings and the indication of distance by the attenua-
tion of the work, suffice to give them an optical in-
terest, so that the graver of Holbein, or rather that
of the engraver under his orders, seems by turns
rich in the scenes of the " Emperor" and the " Pope,"
undulating in the " Paradise," picturesque in those
of the " Carter " and the " Husbandman."

A perfection has been added to xylographic prints
by putting bits of paper or thin cards on certain
parts of the wheel that transmits the pressure of the
roller to the plate, thus securing greater or less pres-
sure at desired places. If one wishes to bring for-
ward the foreground of an engraving, increased
thickness of cards is given to the place that corre-
sponds to it. Is vagueness desired in the back-
ground, the roller is forced farther off, so that the
pressure being less and the ink less abundant, the
tone is lighter.

Aided by these new methods that make printing
an auxiliary artist, wood engraving now produces
marvels. In France, more than in any other coun-
try, this mode of engraving has served the interests
of thought by the ornamentation of books. The
profession of printer and book-editor were often
united, and from the fifteenth century exercised at
Lyons, Paris, and other cities of France, by men of
culture and taste whose names belong to the History
of Art. Among the number are Simon Vostre,
whose " Books of Hours " have such curious borders ;

WOOD ENGKAVING. 299

Antoine Verard, who used xylography as a back-
ground for colored miniatures ; Guyot Marchand
who, before Holbein, printed " Dances of Death " ;
and Geoffroi Tory, who was distinguished by the
universality of his knowledge and his talents.

The last imported the Italian style of the Renais-
sance into our wood engraving, in which, up to that
time, had appeared only a Gothic archaism or the
Gallic spirit, with its familiar turn, its ironical na-
ivete, its malice. We must recall also the names of
Jean Dupre, Trechsel, Jean de Tournes, Bernard
Salomon. The names of these old printers are to-
day sought as works of art. French and Italian
artists of the first rank have not disdained to write
upon wood the inventions that were to put in relief
their knowledge and that of others. As Titian
painted with great pen-strokes the master-pieces
Boldrini was to cut, as Jean de Calcar drew at Ven-
ice the magnificent plates for the " Anatomy " of the
celebrated Vesali, so Jean Goujon illustrated the
translation of Vitruvius by Jean Martin, while Phili-
bert Delorme and Jean Cousin traced the elegant
wood engravings that decorate their books upon
architecture and perspective.

Our age has witnessed the revival of wood engrav-
ing, a revival that twenty-five years ago gave us the
graceful and tender vignettes of Johannot and the
spirituelle sketches of Gigoux, who, at every page of
" Gil Bias," opens a window upon Spanish, or rather
upon human life. All these little works conceived

300 . WOOD ENGRAVING.

and executed according to the laws of xylography,
seem to speak to the reader a language brief, unfin-
ished, that it is his task to finish. At the present
moment it is no longer so. Treating his plate as a
canvas washed with white, the designer covers the
wood with blended tints, imitating the layers of the
aquarelle, or the depths of mezzotint. Forced to fol-
low the modelling of the figures, to put them in
unison with a mysterious landscape or a background
richly and carefully finished, the engraver is led out
of his domain to attempt the impossible imitation
of copper plate engraving. But this bold overthrow
of the old method has produced certain effects of
unforeseen beauty in the interpretation of the " Hell "
of Dante, or, when before the eyes of the reader
are unrolled the savannas, the virgin forests that in
" Atala " are so mingled with the drama as to seem
like mute but impassioned personages. Finding
under their graver an unknown gamut of varied
tones, of fugitive half-tints that serve as transitions
more or less rapid between the velvety, profound
black, and the pure, brilliant white, the engravers of
Dore have represented marvellously the landscapes
of America, the herds of buffalo traversing the Mes-
chacebe, the enormous pines whose overthrown
trunks serve as bridges across yawning chasms, the
dawn rising over the Alleghanies, and the moired
neavens, diapered with clouds that seem to change
its aspect whether they catch a sunbeam in their pas-
sage, or the moon fringes them with its light. But

WOOD ENGRAVING. 301

the weakness of the new method is betrayed in the
representation of antique scenes, in which man held
the first place, where the idea dominated the panthe-
ism of the landscape. In these representations the
accessory has become the "principal, the setting of
the thought devours the thought itself, the actors are
overpowered by the magnificence of the decora-
tions.

For the illustration of books, it is better to go
back to the traditions of Holbein, Calcar, and Jean
Goujon, and for large plates, to the firm, concise cut-
tings of Albert Diirer, or to the style of Christopher
Jegher, the Piranesi of wood engraving, who, envelop-
ing with a superb stroke, forms that palpitate upon
the paper, makes them vibrate and blaze with the
genius of Rubens.

VII.

ENGRAVING IN CAMAIEU.
ENGRAVING IN COLORS.

THE cameo is an engraving of several tones ob-
tained by the aid of superposed plates. I say of
several tones and not of several tints, for it is an en-
graving of a single color, a monochrome ; but this
tint bistred, greenish, or bluish not being the same as
that of paper colored with bistre, green, or blue, the
chiaro 'scuro of the print allows always some parts
of the pure white of the paper to appear.

The most simple cameo is that made with two
plates engraved in relief. The first gives the proof
the contour and the strong shadows ; the second
inked, for instance, with bistre, will print in bistre
the half-shadows, without touching the lights, so that
the whiteness of the paper, everywhere that it may
have been spared, will heighten the bistred tint and
the dark shadows, as if the painting had been first
washed then touched with white with the brush.

If one wishes to graduate the half-tints he will use
ihree plates, the first printing the most intense black,
the others a second and third tone of different inten-
sity. Sometimes the three plates having been cov-
ered with black, a fourth is used to spread a uniform

ENGRA VING. 303

color over the whole plate, always reserving the
white for the lights.

It is interesting to know how the inventors of
cameo were led to their invention. Printing having
replaced the beautiful and rare manuscripts by mul-
tiplied books, the first printers wished to make the
products of their industry pass for manuscripts, and
thus add the appearance of quality to quantity. To
accomplish this, they left in white the capital letters,
the titles or rubrics — so-called because usually writ-
ten in red. After the book was printed, these ru-
brics and letters were filled in by the hand of an
artist.

But the secrets of printing were soon known.
" When it became impossible," says Paul Cheron,
("Gazette des Beaux-Arts "), "to conceal the means
by which copies of the same book were multiplied,
there was an economic interest in multiplying also
the ornamental letters. These letters were evidently
composed of pieces of different colors inked sepa-
rately, then fastened one within another, to be printed
simultaneously."

These methods were a first step towards cameo-
engraving, to which we are indebted for so many
magnificent works. Placing one engraving within
another as in a box, to print them all at once was
suitable for the reproduction of the enlaced orna-
ments of a capital letter, because the contour is fixed,
precise. But it was inapplicable to all that demands
gradation of tone ; shadings like the human figure

304 ENGRA

and landscape. They used then successive plates,
that, being superposed, at each impression left a
shade of color upon the paper; thus it was possible
to imitate aquarelles retouched with white.

The perfection of the cameo, that is its perfect re-
semblance to a drawing, demands that the plates
should be of exactly the same size, and that each in
turn being put under press, they should fit each other
with the greatest precision. To secure this, fine
points, that penetrated the paper always in the same
places, were inserted at the four angles of the frame,
or upon the wheel of the press, to mark the points
at which the plates must touch each other.

This was, properly speaking, the cameo. The
Italians, who claim its invention, gave it the name
of engraving in chiaro 'scuro, because it is mono-
chrome ; they attribute its invention to Ugo da
Carpi, who claims it in an essay addressed to the
Venetian Senate, in 1516. But plates by Lucas
Cranach and Baldung exist, seven years anterior to
the first cameos executed by Da Carpi. Hence the
honor of the discovery belongs to Germany.

But the most beautiful cameos have come to us
from Italy, naturally because the Italian masters,
designers par excellence, have excelled in a branch of
art whose first element is drawing, " the capo di tutto"
says Vasari. Their compositions, when equally well
printed, surpass all that have been executed else-
where. When we look at the " Triumph of Caesar,"
drawn by Andrea Andreani, after Mantegna, we

ENGRA VING. 305

seem to have before us the originals themselves of
those sublime temperas, in which the painter has
evoked the Roman world and the graces of antique
sculpture. When we find upon the plates of the
same engraver the grand drawings traced upon the
dome of Siena by Beccafumi — pictures that arrest
the steps of the traveller and excite his admiration —
we are charmed to see them again and are not less
happy to think that others, without having journeyed
to Italy, may enjoy them.

The use of copper-plate engraving in the cameo
was a progress towards engraving in colors, whose
discovery is due to a painter of Frankfort, Jacques
Christopher le Blon. This ingenious artist thought
he could obtain by successive impressions from su-
perposed plates, not merely a monochrome effect but
a print in several colors. Wood engraving would
have been too coarse for work demanding above all
things delicate shadings. Le Blon used copper
plates upon which he made a graining with the ber-
teau, a steel instrument with almost imperceptible
teeth, finer than that for mezzotint, and as such
graining deposited upon the paper transparent tints,
he conceived the idea of combining these tints with
the three primitive colors, yellow, red, blue, which
placed one upon another would produce mixed col-
ors, orange, violet, and green, without reckoning the
white of the paper, which, reserved in the printing,
would give a fourth element of color.

The chiaro 'scuro of the print would consist in the

306 ENGRA yJNG.

play of dark and light colors, and as the graining
could not engender shadows strong enough, recourse
was had to the graver to hollow the copper in places
where the brown ought to be black and that de-
manded vigorous touches.

Such was the method invented by Le Blon, or at
least brought to perfection by him, for rude sketches
of this method had already appeared in certain im-
pressions essayed in Holland by Pierre Lastman, the
master of Rembrandt.

The art of printing pictures is a useful invention
but upon condition that the imitation of painting
shall be avoided. The " Portrait of Louis Quinze,"
printed by Le Blon, with four plates, shows the de-
fects of his invention, ill employed. The delicacies
of the human head, and the expression of life, are
not consonant with this mechanical mixture of col-
ors, which is neither engraving nor painting. There
results a bastard production, to which one may ap-
ply the dictum of the celebrated engraver Longhi :
" Colored prints, never able to be what is really nec-
essary, are mere puerilities." As compensation ; in
rendering intelligible to the eye scientific works,
books upon natural history, anatomy, architecture, or
polychrome ornamentation, a print in colors becomes
a very valuable auxiliary.

After having furnished the charming engravings
of Debucourt, the methods of Le Blon were re-
placed by chromolithography, which consists of sue-

ENGRA VING. 307

cessive impressions from lithographic stones, as nu-
merous as the tints that are to appear in the print.
Tried at Munich in 1814, perfected by Engelmann
in 1837, and brought to an unexpected degree of
delicacy and transparency, by an artist of Cologne,
Kellerhoven, lithography in colors is used for the
reproduction of the miniatures of old manuscripts,
to illustrate books of ornamentation, because, thanks
to the perfection to which the fabrication of paper
has been brought, the juxtaposition and superposi-
tion of colors can be made with the greatest exact-
ness. " Formerly," says Firmin Didot (" De la Gra-
vure sur Bois "), " it was necessary to soften the
rigidity and grain of the paper by wetting, before
putting it under the press, and the variable dampness
of the paper thus soaked with water, distended the
sheets unequally and occasioned continual variation
in the marking points. These inconveniences are
avoided by printing upon dry paper."

The " Temple of Selinus," by Hittorff, the " Gram-
mar of Ornament." published at London by Owen
Jones, the " Spanish Iconography," published at
Madrid, by Carderera, the " Imitation of Christ," by
Curmer, and the numerous plates that accompany
the books of Gailhabaud and Caesar Daly, are mag-
nificent works that it would have been impossible to
execute and that would have been almost unintelli-
gible without chromolithography.

Nevertheless, considered in its noblest attribute,
which is to perpetuate the great masters, engraving

308 ENGRA VING.

is not compatible with color. In aspiring by painful
efforts at impossible similitude, it loses its peculiar
characteristics without acquiring new ones. What
it seeks to gain in richness by mechanical artifices, ii
loses in dignity by the change of style. Contrary
to the opinion of Emeric David (" Historic de la
Gravure "), we believe with Diderot, that engraving
is less a copy than a translation. Like the musician
who transposes an air, like the prose-writer who in-
terprets in his own language the poets of a foreign
tongue by insisting above all and before all upon the
genius of the poem, the artist who engraves a paint-
ing upon copper, reproduces the spirit of it, that is
the composition, drawing, character, expression ; and
if the local colors disappear, the general coloration
remains, concentrated, unified in the chiaro 'scuro.
One principle it is important to remember, we should
not attempt by one method what can be better done
by another.

ALLIED TO ENGRAVING is LITHOGRAPHY; THE ART

OF TRACING UPON STONE A DRAWING FROM WHICH IM-
PRESSIONS CAN BE PRINTED.

ALTHOUGH a German invented it, lithography is a
French art, French by the qualities it demands;
quick observation, facility, esprit, the use of a lively,
animated language, which, for fear of wearying, re-
frains from saying all, and a superficial manner of
expressing profound things. The word esprit has
here two significations. It means not only the abil-
ity to catch delicate relations and show their brill-
iancy by comparison or contrast, but also the talent
of perceiving the essential of an image, that which
is characteristic of it. Lithography, like conversa-
tion, demands spirit in the foundation, and wit in the
form.

It seems as if Nature, the better to secure the
solidarity of the human race, pleases herself by pro-
ducing in one country what is necessary to the gen-
ius of another. Lithography, which would seem to
have been created expressly for the artists of France,

3 1 0 LITHO GRAPHY.

was discovered in Bavaria, and could not have been
elsewhere, since there was a condition indispensable
to its invention — the existence of a compact lime-
stone, neither too hard nor too soft, with smooth sur-
face, fine grain, but rough enough to rasp the pencil.
This stone is found in perfection only in the quarries
of Solenhofen, in Bavaria, where for ages it has been
used for house-floors. At Munich all the halls are
paved with it, and it was in noticing the fineness and
polish of these stones that a dramatic author — Alois
Senefelder — a native of Prague, invented lithog-
raphy.

Wretchedly poor, this man of inventive genius,
sustained by German perseverance, had the strange
idea of printing his own works by engraving them
with aquafortis upon a plate of copper. He was too
poor to buy more than one plate and was frightened
to see its thickness diminishing as he effaced one
page to begin another. He was trying to substitute
some cheaper material for the copper when accident
put him upon the road to his discovery.

One day when at work, his mother asked him to
write the washing-list for the laundress. His paper
had all been used for proofs. Having at hand a
stone he had just polished he wrote the memoran-
dum upon it, intending to copy it. The ink he used
was varnish, that is a mixture of wax, soap, and
lampblack. Having copied the writing, when about
to efface it, it occurred to him to see what would be-
come of it if he poured aquafortis upon the stone.

LITHOGRAPHY. 3 1 1

The level of the stone was lowered everywhere ex-
cept upon the parts covered with the ink, so that the
writing appeared in relief like a wood-engraving.
That was the beginning of the invention. It re-
mained to prove, by turning it to the profit of art,
the property the stones of Solenhofen have of ab-
sorbing greasy substances, consequently of rendering
inaccessible to dampness all traces left upon them by
pen or pencil.

Lithography was invented in 1 799, but perfected
chemically and mechanically by Engelmann, — the
first lithograph printer in France, — Motte, Lemer-
cier, and the Count de Lasteyrie, whose names are
inseparably connected with lithographic art.

The advantage of the lithograph is that, better
than any other method, it puts in relief the genius,
the characteristics, the temperament of each master,
because it does not require the intervention of a for-
eign hand and is capable of representing subjects
the most diverse.

It is an art that a single generation saw born and
fall into desuetude, but before passing away it made
the tour of our epoch, reported its thoughts, its cus-
toms, its elegancies, its vagaries; Deveria used it
gracefully to illustrate the life of the boudoir, Ga-
varni to represent the comedy of his time. Dau-
mier stamped upon it the grimace of caricature, with
it Raffet put armies in the field. This easy talk —
lithography — Raffet elevated to the sublime in the
" Reveil," a strange dream in which, like ghosts, ap-

3 1 2 LJTHO GRAPHY.

pear the barefoot volunteers of '92, the sergeant of
Marengo, the ensign of Austerlitz, the sappers of
the Beresina, the grenadiers of Montmirail and
Champaubert. In the " Night Review," they reap-
pear, armed, cuirassed spectres, grouped under the
funereal light of the other world.

At the moment of being abandoned by painters,
lithography became, in France and Germany, a vari-
ation of engraving ; it deserved well of art by trans-
lating by the hand of Lecomte, the charming
thoughts of Prudhon, and the Ossianic dreams of
Girodet ; under the delicate pencil of Sudre, the
" Sistine Chapel " of Ingres ; and upon the stones of
Mouilleron the famous " Night Watch " of Rem-
brandt, with its mysterious effects that the mezzotint
cannot give with vigor, and in which the light, by
turns lost and found again by the scratching-knife,
hollows fantastic depths to which the reliefs of form
and the accents of touch fasten themselves.

Woe to the societies that allow lithography and
engraving to perish. They are the daily papers that
constrain us to live, if but for a few minutes, in the
regions of art and the ideal ; they educate the peo-
ple gratuitously, manifest the beautiful, teach history,
making it intelligible to the most illiterate, the hum-
blest, by giving them the sight of ideas.

ConclUjStcm.

THE more we reflect upon it, the more clearly we
perceive that man created the first arts by the reac-
tion of an innate sentiment, that of order, proportion,
unity, against the opposite characteristics presented
by inorganic nature — infinite complexity, the ab-
sence of visible proportion, the immensity of ap-
parent disorder. Let us imagine, if possible, what
passed in the mind of man when he appeared on
earth after the frightful cataclysms that had thrown it
into confusion. Burned by volcanoes or drowned by
deluges, the terrestrial globe might present the spec-
tacle of the sublime, but man bears within himself
the elements of the beautiful — order, proportion,
harmony. Sovereignly free by imagination and mas-
ter by virtue of intelligence, he was none the less
subject to an admirable order, the order which in his
body is symmetry, in his mind reason, in his move-
ments equilibrium.

Thus made, man invents successively all the arts.
Under his hand inert substances express beliefs and
thoughts, arranging stones according to certain laws,
imprinting upon them by means of symmetry the
stamp of unity, he communicates to them an arti-
ficial proportion, a sort of organism that renders
them expressive, and Architecture is invented.

3 14 CONCLUSION.

Measuring sounds, putting into them a rhythm
marked by the beatings of his own heart, he brings
them back to the unity of sentiment and creates
Music.

He arranges the trees, directs the flow of waters,
regulates their fall, prunes the wild plants, produces
new flowers, and converts the savage wastes into a
vast landscape-garden.

Wishing to imitate the human figure, man has no
longer to introduce order, proportion, unity, of which
he is himself the most striking model ; but correct-
ing the errors of individual nature, he uses it to re-
construct the species, and ascending thus, through
the innumerable accidents of life, to original unity,
to primitive and perfect proportions, he invents
Sculpture.

Does he wish to fix, by means of forms and colors,
the features of a creature that is dear to him, or the
memory of an action that has moved him, he begins
by inclosing the desired image in a frame that separ-
ates it from all other images ; he puts order into it
by arrangement, proportion by drawing, unity by the
distribution of light, and finds a new art — Painting.

The arts were created then not to imitate nature,
but to express the human soul by means of imitated
nature.

And what noble imitation, how independent it is
in all the arts. In Architecture subject to no model,
not copying created things, it imitates only the su-
preme intelligence that has created them. It studies

CONCLUSION. 315

the thoughts that presided over the formation of the
human body. In Music it makes us listen to what it
is impossible to understand ; with sounds it paints
the night, dreams, the desert ; and, as Rousseau says,
" with noise it expresses silence."

More imitative because it has an obligatory, inevi-
table model, Sculpture forbids the pushing of imita-
tion to the utmost ; it uses the weight of marble to
represent the lightness of hair, suppresses the fugi-
tive look of the eye but insists upon the permanency
of the mind, imitates natural forms but to draw from
them more perfect, ideal forms.

Painting, more imitative still than sculpture, de-
parts from nature by an enormous license — figuring
length, breadth, and depth, upon a flat surface.

Thus all the arts born in the mind or heart of
man are so elevated above Nature, that the more lite-
rally and servilely they copy her, the more they tend
to degrade and destroy themselves. The arts of de-
sign, in their highest dignity, are not so much arts
of imitation as of expression. And if the photo-
graph is a marvellous invention without being an art,
it is because in its indifference it imitates all, and ex-
presses nothing. Where there is no choice, there is
no art. Gathering together features scattered in the
real world, and lost in the immensity of things, the
artist makes them serve the expression of his
thought, bring it to the light of day, plain, clear,
visible, sensible, one. Reality contains only the
germs of beauty; from it he sets free beauty itselfl

316 CONCLUSION.

Thus the artist is superior to nature. He unravels
what is entangled, lights up what is obscure, compels
the silent to speak, and if he wishes to imprint upon
his representations the stamp of grandeur, he puri-
fies the real from the accidents that have corrupted
it, the alloy that has adulterated it ; abridges what is
diffuse, simplifies what is impoverished and compli-
cated by detail, and in simplifying aggrandizes it.
In a word, in natural truth he discovers typical
truth — style.

It is nevertheless true that, in the arts of design,
painting especially, there are works that charm by
their naivete alone, having an unexpected and spon-
taneous grace in certain creations, in which, the por-
trait sufficing, the type would be out of place. Style
is not befitting everywhere. If one wishes to give
to forms the savor of the accidental, he emphasizes
detail, if grandeur is the object, he simplifies. No-
tions of aesthetics are so obscure, so little diffused,
that it is believed style is irreconcilable with nature,
that the expression of life cannot be found outside
of the individual who alone is living ; that the ideal
is the imaginary and there is nothing true but the
real.

What is a living being ? It is a being all of whose
molecules are arranged in a certain order around a
centre, so arranged that their separation is impossi-
ble. The idea of the being existed before the being
and will persist after it ; before there were individ-
uals there was a type ; before there were horses

CONCLUSION. 317

there was the type of a horse, since all horses in
spite of accidental differences, resemble each other
so nearly as never to be confounded with other races.
They belong to the same family, originated from
the same stock, attach themselves to a primitive ex-
emplar with which they have maintained a common
resemblance, generic, unchangeable. This primitive
exemplar is the ideal.

The ideal then is the prototype of all beings of
the same genus ; virtually it contains the individuals
that exist, those that have existed and those that will
exist. It is permanent, they pass away ; it is invari-
able, they change ; it is one and identical, they are
unequal and innumerable ; it is immortal, they per-
ish. Real beings are casts, more or less imperfect,
from an ideal mould eternally engraved upon the
divine thought. To idealize the figure of a living
being is not to diminish its life, but, on the contrary,
to add to it the accents of a more abundant, higher
life, discovering in it characteristic features, the es-
sential of its race. To idealize the real is to take it
from time, to manifest what is eternal in that which
is perishable.

If the types of perfection were only a dream of
the mind, if the artist were not led to them by long
and profound study of living nature, if the visible
and the known were not his point of departure in
lifting himself to the unknown and invisible, his cre-
ations would be only cold phantoms, because life
would be absent and the ideal would be imaginary.

318 CONCLUSION.

But when the artist has sought the type, the product
of sentiment and thought, in a being that is a child
of life, he is senseless to believe, to say that the
ideal is a frozen conventionality, a vague and vain
chimera.

Let us guard against thinking that principles are
bonds to freedom, a shackle to genius. Reynolds
compared them to the solid armor, that to the feeble
warrior is a burden, but that robust men bear easily
as a defence, even as a decoration. Far from being
embarrassed by aesthetic laws, in some respects they
will give the artist more liberty by freeing him from
the restraint of uncertainty, the hindrance of ob-
scurity. The principles of art are not of inflexible
rigor. The exceptional, the accidental, the irregular
are everywhere, even in the machine of the universe,
that nevertheless is not shaken by them. Often the
heavens are traversed by brilliant meteors that it
would seem must derange the concert of astronomic
laws ; in the numbers that express the revolutions of
our planet, there are fractions that are apparent er-
rors, which in time correct themselves so that there
is no dissonance that does not resolve itself into the
universal harmony. So in the realm of art, there is
room for the happy deviations of liberty, for the con-
tradictions of genius, and we may rejoice when they
introduce novelties that seem to falsify tradition, but
really augment its treasures.

But will the perfection of the type ever be at-
tained ? Will the art of man finally discover, in all

CONCLUSION. 319

its splendor the primitive exemplar of creatures ?
Shall we ever see entirely removed the veil lifted by
Grecian genius, the veil that covers the mysterious
and sacred model of which we have within us a con-
fused, obscure image, as if sometime we had " con-
templated beings in their essence and dwelt with the
gods." It may be that the day in which the curi-
osity of the human soul should be satisfied, the day
in which man should possess in their fullness the
truth he seeks, the happiness he hopes for, the beau-
tiful he aspires to, life would be aimless ; and hu-
manity satiated, inactive, useless, could only pass
away or be transformed into a higher order of crea-
tion. But were it true that the extinction of the hu-
man race would be consequent upon the realization
of its Utopias, our world certainly cannot be near its
end.

Devoted more than ever to the worship of the
real, it carries the taste for it into the arts ; hence -the
gross naturalism that under the pretext of showing
us the real truth, invites the passer-by to look at fla-
grant crimes of vulgarity and indecency instead of
the chaste nudities of art. Hence also the usurpa-
tions of photography, whose eye, so clairvoyant in
the world of matter, is blind to the world of mind.

That will be but for a time. New horizons will
open to the eyes of the coming generations ; already
we perceive them, we who wander on the confines of
.the future. It seems to us that aesthetics, a modern

320 CONCLUSION.

science, although born in the meditations of an an-
cient poet, the pupil of Socrates, will henceforth
serve to enlighten the teaching of the fine arts. Af-
ter having existed in the condition of presentiment,
of intuition, in the soul of great artists of the past,
the principles drawn from their works will guide fu-
ture masters. Now last, the philosophy of the beau-
tiful will resume its natural place, the first. Once
found through the glimmering of sentiment, the
darkness that envelops it, synthesis will, in its turn,
be the guiding torch.

If future artists shall lack the grace of the precur-
sors, the charm inherent in things that one divines
and in the hope of the beautiful, in lieu thereof their
march will be firmer, surer, and their route being
shortened, life will be longer. They will not be slow
to follow this humanity become so breathless, so
eager to live. Strong in accumulated riches, and
acquired facility, they will have time to cut new facets
on the diamond — art. In the mean time, thank
Heaven, genius has not abandoned this earth. We
have always had chosen creatures, winged natures,
masters. We have them to-day, we shall have them
to-morrow. We cannot doubt it ; from another Icti-
nus another Phidias will be born, and other Ra
phaels who will find new ways of being sublime
For neither the beautiful, nor the ideal, nor style are
dead, because of their very nature they are immor-
tal ; and although in certain periods of decadence

CONCLUSION.

321

they seemed threatened with destruction, they have
only slumbered, like the Evangelist, whom the poe-
try of the Middle Ages represents to us as sleeping
in his tomb, where, cradled by dreams, he awaits
the awakening angel.

PAINTINGS DESCRIBED IN THIS WORK.

Those marked with an asterisk (*) are represented by engravings.

PAGE

APOTHEOSIS OF HOMER 61

BATTLE-FIELD OF EYLAU. Louvre Gros 58

BATTLE OF ABOUKIR. Louvre Gros. . . . 226

BATTLE OF CONSTANTINE. Vatican Raphael. . . . 227

*BERTIN Ingres 233

CHRIST AT THE TOMB Eugene Delacroix. . , . 167

CLYTEMNESTRE Gudrin .... 140

CORONATION OF MARIE DE MEDICIS. Louvre Rubens 131

CURE OF THE LAME MAN. South Kensington.. ..Raphael 2?

DAWN OF CHRISTIANITY. Pantheon, Paris Chenavard. ... 30

DESCENT FROM THE CROSS. Antwerp Rubens. ... 46

DISPUTA. Vatican Raphael. ... 46

*ELYMAS STRUCK WITH BLINDNESS Raphael 89

*£RASMUS Holbein 293

HAMLET AND THE GRAVE-DIGGER Delacroix 167

HELIODORUS DRIVEN FROM THE TEMPLE. Vatican.. .Raphael 62

*HuT OF THE BIG TREE Rembrandt. ...211

JEWISH WEDDING IN MOROCCO Delacroix 167

JUDGMENT OF SOLOMON Lesueur 60

JUSTICE OF TRAJAN Delacroix 168

*LAST SUPPER. Milan Leonardo da Vinci. ... 80

LAST JUDGMENT. Sistine Chapel Michael Angela. ... 70

LIFE OF ST. BRUNO Lesueur 43

MARRIAGE AT CAN A. Louvre Paul Veronese. ... 63

MONA LISA. Louvre Leonardo da Vinci . . . 235

Music LESSON. Louvre Caspar Netscher ... 204

NIGHT WATCH. Haag Rembrandt 133

PHILOSOPHERS. Louvre Rembrandt 132

324 PAINTINGS DESCRIBED IN THIS WORK.

PACK

•PORTRAIT Holbein 235

PROPHETS AND SIBYLS. Sistine Chapel Michael Angela 79

•SACRIFICE OF ABRAHAM Rembrandt 87

SERMENT DU JEU DE PAUME David 58

SHEPHERDS OF ARCADIA Nicholas Poussin 23

SHIPWRECK OF THE " MEDUSA " 128

SISTINE MADONNA. Dresden Raphael 46

ST. PAUL AT EPHESUS Lesueur 60

•SUPPER AT EMMAUS . . . Rembrandt .22, 142

TESTAMENT OF EUDAM!DAS Poussin 43

TRANSFIGURATION. Vatican Raphael 45

TRIUMPH OF JULIUS CESAR. Mantua Mantegna . . . . 59

•VIRGIN AND SAINTS. (Copy.) Academy at Venice

Gio. Bellini . ... 183

•VIRGIN OF FRANCIS THE FIRST. Louvre Raphael. . . . 1 16

•VOLTAIRE'S STAIRCASE Chenavard — 27

WINE DRINKERS. Royal Gallery, Madrid Velasquez 14

YOUNG MAN DRESSED IN BLACK. Louvre Fr'ancia. ... 144

GENERAL INDEX.

Achromatism .... 153
Aim of the Arts of Design, to manifest the beautiful . . -25

Albert Diirer, characteristics of his drawing . . . . 291

Anamorphoses 64

Animals, when may they receive the imprint of style . . 221

Aquafortis of Piranesi ... 276

Aquatint, mode of engraving .... . . 283

Architecture, mode of engraving ... . 265

Arrangement of a picture .34

Arrangement, symmetrical 37

Arrangement, in equilibrium .... 39

Arrangement, pyramidal 44

Arrangement, unity its one principle, its true secret ... 46

Art, its effect upon manners and morals 9

Arts, their creation . 313

Battles and hunting-scenes can be painted only with probable

truth 225

Border, form of, ought to be indicated by dominant line of picture 46

Cameo, what is it 302

Cameo, mode of printing 302

Cameo, what led to its invention ....... 303

Cameo, a German discovery 304

Ceilings and Cupolas, their decoration 184

Character of objects not seized by the eye, but by the thought . 99
Character, its germ to be found in the caricatures of the market

and the faubourg . . . . . . . . 112

Chiaro 'scuro the essential part of painting 123

Chromo-lithography 307

326 GENERAL INDEX.

Color, the only language of inorganic nature . • 4

Color and sentiment, affinity between them .... 145

Color, a means of expression 146

Color, what is it . 149

Color, is it produced by the eye 156

Color of the Light 165

Color, its true rfile 169

Colors, primitive three, composite three .... 148

Colors, their vibration 164

Complementary colors, their law 150

Complement of a color in the surrounding space .... 155

Composition not improvised 68

Composition, tests of , . . 69

Composition, coloring of sketch preferable ... 74

Dance of Death 295

Dance of Death, characteristics of the engraving . . 297

Designing, hollowing fictitious depths upon smooth surfaces . 105

Dignity of the painter measured by the difficulty of his work . 202

Distemper 183

Drapery, its superiority over costume . . . . . 228

Drapery, faults of the Venetian school . . . . . 229

Drapery, the graver should make apparent its material quality . 259

Drawing, definition of 98

Drawing, geometrical, should be first taught . . . • . 103
Drawing, beginner must learn forms before drawing them . .104

Drawing, principles of, correct . . . . . . . 107

Drawing, Raphael's Virgins . . . . . .-..114

Drawing, different modes of, illustrated by Raphael and Albert

Diirer 109

Egyptian painting, individuality lost in the uniformity of the sym-
bol .' .113

Enamel painting . . - . . . . . . 191

Encaustic painting . . . . . . . . 199

Engraving, what is it 239

Engraving, in relief . . 240

Engraving, in intaglio 240

Engraving, direction of cuttings to imitate the perspective of

bodies 246

GENERAL INDEX, 327

f

Engraving, method upon copper 248

Engraving, should be an art apart from pure drawing . . 251

Engraving, aerial perspective introduced by Lucas de Leyden . 252

Engraving, a translation that represents the essentials of painting 255

Engraving, method for earth, stones, etc 262

Engraving, method for water 263

Engraving, method for clouds 263

Engraving, method for foliage of trees 264

Engraving, with aquafortis ........ 269

Engraving, Rembrandt's manner 272

Engraving, in colors, its discovery 305

Engraving, not compatible with color 308

Esprit in engraving 309

Expression and beauty, interval between them . . . . 18

Expression of lines 40

Expression attained by means of gesture . . . 78, 83

Fiction in art, its r&le . 16

Finish, its meaning in painting . 175

First law of painting, to choose what it shall express . . 25

Flesh, mode of engraving 260

Fresco painting . 180

Genre painting and historical, distinction between them . . 236

Gesture, modified by temperament, varied by custom, climate, etc. 76

Gesture, its roots in the human heart 76

Gesture, optical language, illustrated by Rembrandt ... 85

Graver and aquafortis, comparison between them . . . 273

Guaches and aquarelles 195

Hair, mode of engraving ........ 261

Horizon, elevation of 57

Horizon lines, two in one picture 63

Ideal the, the prototype of all beings of the same genus . . 317

Illumination igj

Invention in painting 30

Italian style, application to wood-engraving .... 299

328 GENERAL INDEX.

Jointed models of the ancients ....... 95

Landscape, imitation plays the most important r61e, but the painter

must idealize the real . . . . . . . - 210

Landscape, the artist gives to it that which it has not, sentiment

and thought ' . 214

Last word of art, to reconcile force of gesture with beauty of

movement 86

Light and shadow, a means of expression only in modern times 126
Light, choice of, must be left to the will of the painter . . . 1 29
Light, when chosen, may be narrow or wide, diffuse or concen-
trated, animated or cold m. 131

Light should fall perpendicularly upon the human figure, obliquely

upon the landscape . . . . . . -134

Lights and shadows, their arrangement in a picture . . . 136

Lights and shadows, their diminution 142

Lithography, its invention 310

Lithography, its advantages ' 311

Mezzotints, manner of engraving . 279

Mezzotints, their inventor 280

Mezzotints, objects to which they are suited .... 282

Mezzotints, fault inherent in this style 282

Miniatures 196

Model, the, an instruction, a reference 117

Modelling of the picture a peculiarity of modern art ... .127

Models, rarity of fine ones . < 119

Models, the introduction of their commonplace features character-
istic of the decadence ....... 119

Morality taught by painting •• 7

Mural painting the loftiest field for the artist .... 179

Nature, r&le in genre pictures 84

Nature, 'from her the painter draws the elements of the ideal . 97
Nature shows the artist what he carries in the depths of his own

soul 100

Nature, her spectacles want the essential characteristic of art,

unity ... . 213

Nielli, invented by Finiguerra . . . . ... 242

GENERAL INDEX. 329

Nielli, method of printing 243

Nielli, the invention that was such in Europe not new in the world 244

Oil painting . 187

Optical angle -65

Optical beauty under the sovereign law of unity . . . 138
Optical mixture ... 162

Painting supplants sculpture, when, by what means . . 2

Painting and sculpture, differing aims of . 3

Painting not an imitation 5

Painting a mean between sculpture and music . . . . 12

Painting, its limitations 13

Pantomime, use of 91

Pastel Painting .190

Pencilling, imitation of 284

Perfection of the type, will it ever be attained . . . -319
Perspective, linear and aerial ....... 49

Perspective, rules of 55

Perspective, point of distance . . . . . . . 54, 63

Perspective, point of sight ... ... 48, 60

Perspective, the ideal of visible things . > . . . 67

Perspective, the science of apparent forms 102

Physiognomy 234

Picturesque form of metaphysical idea 29

Plates of lava or porcelain, their use 193

Pointing, modelling with points 285

Portrait, its perfection the last word of painting . . . 230
Portrait, attitude one of the grandest means of expression . . 231

Principles not bonds to freedom , 318

Printer and book editor, union of crafts . . . . 298

Proof, its relation to the print 241

Sculpture the dominant art of antiquity i

Sculpture, its limitations 19

Shadows, their management with oils 189

Sketch transformed by light 121

Soul influences the muscles but not the blood .... 93

Still life, definition, illustrations 203

33° GENERAI INDEX.

Style, its signification 19

Style, is its quality the same in painting as in sculpture . .no
Style being typical truth exists only for beings endowed with or-
ganic and animal life 207

Sublimity in painting from thought perceived but not formulated 22

Teniers master of touch 176

Tone, to be distinguished from tint ... .124

Touch in painting what calligraphy is in writing . . . 170
Touch, its conventionalities felt, its characters varied first in the

I7th century 172

Touch, should be broad in large, and delicate in small works . 173

Touch should be natural 177

Truth is beauty 8

Unity the secret of composition 46

Unity of chiaro 'scuro .139

Values, definition of 123

Wax painting . 182

White and black not colors 158

White and black, their aesthetic value 160

Wood-engraving, its revival in our own time .... 299

Wood-engraving, attempted imitation of copper-plate . . 300

Xylograph, what is its r&le i 286

Xylographic books, definition ...... . 288

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