Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Various

Various

Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 / Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852

THE MEDIÆVAL MANIA

History is said to be a series of reactions. Society, like a pendulum, first drives one way, and then swings back in the opposite direction. At present, we may be said to be returning at full speed towards a taste for everything old, neglected, and for ages despised. Science and refinement have had their day, and now rude nature and the elemental are to be in the ascendant. In our boyhood, we learned the Roman alphabet; but youngsters now had need to add a knowledge of black-letter, which is rapidly getting back into fashion. Perfection is only to be found in the darkness and ignorance of the middle ages.

It is proper, no doubt, to get rid of what is tame and spiritless in art; and it must be owned that nearly everything that was done in architecture and decoration during the Georgian era was detestable. But it is one thing to reform, and another to revolutionise. Let us by all means go to nature for instruction; but nature under the exercise of cultivated feeling—selecting what tends to ennoble and refine, not that which degrades and sends us back to forms and ideas totally out of place in the nineteenth century, and which, for that very reason, can have nothing but a temporary reign, to be followed in the succeeding age by a violent reaction.

On a former occasion, we drew attention to this tendency towards mediævalism as regards ornamental design, and took the Great Exhibition to witness the fact. We have also pointed to that strange phenomenon, the rise anew of monastic institutions among us, long after their object is accomplished, giving a spectre-like expression to an obsolete idea; we have exposed, likewise, the inclination of the working-classes to trust to the protection, and, on every emergency, claim as a matter of right the aid of the wealthy, thus wilfully and deliberately returning to the condition of serfdom: we have now to trace the mediæval mania in a department where, notwithstanding all this ominous conjunction of symptoms, its appearance is truly surprising—in the department of high art in painting.

Our readers need not fear that we are about to inflict on them a scientific dissertation. All we wish to do, is to explain to them a word, with the meaning of which many of them are very imperfectly acquainted, and by the mere explanation, to enable them to determine upon its claims to designate—not merely a school, but the school of art, destined, if founded in truth and nature, to overturn every other. This word—Pre-Raphaelitism—is taken from the name of one of the Italian masters, and it is necessary, in order to understand the question, to ascertain what were the circumstances and the genius that have thus set him up as a landmark in the history of art.

After the fall of the Western Empire, the fine arts were lost, and their productions literally buried in the wreck. The minds of the composite nations that arose in Europe had no guide. Men were left to their own instincts, only faintly aided by the ruins and traditions of degenerate Rome; and each series of countries had its own style of art, framed or adopted by the genius of the people. During the middle ages, the style most general in Northern Europe was the Gothic; and by that term the whole system of art during the period is popularly known in England. The state of painting, under the Gothic régime, may be seen in the stained windows of the cathedrals; in which strong outlines and bright colours are laid down without any reference to chiaro-scuro, or the scientific arrangement of light and shadow. This seems a natural stage in art-development, and at the same moment it was seen in equal perfection in China and Europe. In the former region, the people are now beginning to advance a step beyond, through their imitation of English pictures; although, but a few years ago, they burst into fits of laughter on seeing the shadow of the nose in a portrait. In Europe, a gigantic and almost sudden stride was made, towards the close of the fifteenth century, under an influence from which the Chinese were debarred, and the nature of which we shall presently explain.

Let us first, however, just notice, that the charms of gaudy inartistic colouring frequently exercise a powerful sway even over minds familiar with better things; although that sway is always indicative of the decay of intellectual or moral freshness. Thus, it is remarked by an old Greek author (Dionysius of Halicarnassus), that the perfection to which painting had been brought by Apelles, had degenerated under Augustus; the painters being so much fascinated by the new art of colouring, that they neglected design, and preferred the brilliant or gaudy to the solid, and counterfeit to natural beauty. What this 'perfection' of Apelles was, we cannot now tell; but the probability is, that it existed only in design, and that the union of this with artistic colouring was reserved for the modern masters.

Before these masters appeared, and before the influence we are about to refer to was felt in Europe, some efforts were made by unassisted genius to rise beyond the conventionalities of the time; in the latter half of the thirteenth century, Cimabue already surpassed his modern Greek preceptors; and his disciple Giotto was considered so natural and original, that his style could not be referred to any existing school, but was called the maniera di Giotto. 'Instead of the harsh outline,' says Vasari, 'circumscribing the whole figure, the glaring eyes, the pointed hands and feet, and all the defects arising from a total want of shadow, the figures of Giotto exhibit a better attitude; the heads have an air of life and freedom, the drapery is more natural, and there are even some attempts at fore-shortening the limbs.' All this, however, although a decided improvement on mediæval art, was rude and imperfect—it was only the first faint dawn of a better light. 'As yet,' to use the words of Roscoe, 'the characters rarely excelled the daily prototypes of common life; and their forms, although at times sufficiently accurate, were often vulgar and heavy.... To everything great and elevated, the art was yet a stranger: even the celebrated picture of Pollajuolo exhibits only a group of half-naked and vulgar wretches, discharging their arrows at a miserable fellow-creature, who, by changing places with one of his murderers, might with equal propriety become a murderer himself.'

But the time at length came when that stimulus was to be communicated to taste which sent a thrill throughout the general heart of Europe. The pictures of the old Greeks were lost for ever, dead and gone; but their statues were only buried—buried alive—and now, at the command of wealth and genius, they were dug out of their tomb of ages, and came forth, unharmed, in their enchanted life and immortal beauty. Yes, unharmed; for in the head, the torso, the limb, the hand, the finger, the same principle of life existed as in the entire figure; and, owing to the sublime law of proportion, which bound all together, the minutest fragment indicated a perfect whole. The palace of Lorenzo de Medici was the assembling-place, and the ideal beauty of the Greeks found a new shrine in the groves of Florence. These became a true academia, where genius studied and taught, and where the presiding spirit of the place was Michael Angelo Buonarotti,[A] the sculptor—painter—architect—poet, whose universal mind appeared to fit him, not so much to shine in any one department—although shine he did in all—as to give an impetus to the whole Revival. But Michael Angelo, as a painter, excelled chiefly in design; while one who was his contemporary, and being a few years later in the field, has been supposed by some to be his imitator, was the painter par excellence of the new era—the first great painter of the moderns. This was Raphael. He was the pupil of Perugino; and while such, contented himself with imitating, with the utmost fidelity, the works of that artist; till at length emancipating himself from tutelage, he went for inspiration to the cartoons of Michael Angelo, to the sculptures of the Medici gardens, and to nature herself. Vasari makes Michael Angelo the magnus Apollo of Raphael; but Quatremère de Quincy assigns to the latter artist a holier worship. In a letter from him, which he quotes, respecting his famous picture of the Galatea, Raphael says, that in order to paint a beautiful woman, he must see many, but that, after all, he must work upon a certain ideal image present in his mind. 'We thus see,' says the French critic, 'that he really sought after the beautiful which Nature presents to art, but which the imagination of the artist alone can seize, and genius alone realise.'