ESSAY XXI. The Vatican. L. The Vatican did not quite answer your expectation? H. To say the truth, it was not such a blow as the Louvre ; but then it came after it, and what is more, at the distance of twenty years. To have made the same impression, it should have been twenty times as fine; though that was scarcely possible, since all that there is fine in the Vatican, in Italy, or in the world, was in the Louvre when I first saw it, except the frescoes of Raphael and Michael Angelo, which could not be transported, without taking the walls of the building across the Alps. L. And what, may I ask (for I am curious to hear), did you think of these same frescoes? H. Much the same as before I saw them. As far as I could judge, they are very like the prints. I do not think the spectator's idea of them is enhanced beyond this. The Raphaels, of which you have a distinct and admirable view, are somewhat faded-I do not mean in color, but the outline is injured-and the Sybils and Prophets in the Sistine Chapel are painted on the ceiling at too great a height for the eye to distinguish the faces as accurately as one would wish. The features and expressions of the figures near the bottom of the "Last Judgment" are sufficiently plain, and horrible enough they are. It is like an immense field with carcases and naked You have huge limbs appar L. What was your opinion of the "Last Judgment" itself? H. It is literally too big to be seen. of battle, or charnel-house strewed bodies or it is a shambles of Art. ently torn from their bodies and stuck against the wall: anatomical dissections, backs and diaphragms, tumbling "with hideous ruin and combustion down," neither intelligible groups, nor perspective, nor color: you distinguish the principal figure, that of Christ, only from its standing in the centre of the picture, on a sort of island of earth, separated from the rest of the subject by an inlet of sky. The whole is a scene of enormous, ghastly confu sion, in which you can only make out quantity and number, and vast, uncouth masses of bones and muscles. It has the incoherence and distortion of a troubled dream, without the shadowiness; everything is here corporeal and of solid dimensions. L. But surely there must be something fine in the Sybils and Prophets, from the copies we have of them; justifying the high encomiums of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and of so many others? H. It appears to me that nothing can be finer, as to form, attitude, and outline. The whole conception is so far inimitably noble and just; and all that is felt as wanting, is a proportionable degree of expression in the countenances, though of this I am not sure, for the height (as I said before) baffles a nice scrutiny. They looked to me unfinished, vague, and general. Like some fabulous figure from the antique, the heads were brutal, the bodies divine. Or at most, the faces were only continuations of and on a par with the physical form, large and bold, and with great breadth of drawing, but no more the seat of a vivifying spirit, or with a more powerful and marked intelligence emanating from them, than from the rest of the limbs, the hands, or even drapery. The filling up of the mind is, I suspect, wanting, the divinæ particula auræ: there is a prodigious and mighty prominence and grandeur and simplicity in the features, but they are not surcharged with meaning, with thought or passion, like Raphael's, "the rapt soul sitting in the eyes." On the contrary, they seem only to be half-informed, and might be almost thought asleep. They are fine moulds, and contain a capacity of expression, but are not bursting, teeming with it. The outward, material shrine, or tabernacle, is unexceptionable; but there is not superadded to it a revelation of the workings of the mind within. The forms in Michael Angelo are objects to admire in themselves: those of Raphael are merely a language pointing to something beyond, and full of this ultimate import. L. But does not the difference arise from the nature of the subjects? H. I should think not. Surely, a Sybil in the height of her phrensy, or an inspired Prophet-" seer blest"-in the act of receiving or of announcing the will of the Almighty, is not a less fit subject for the most exalted and impassioned expression than an Apostle, a Pope, a Saint, or a common man. If you say that these persons are not represented in the act of inspired communication, but in their ordinary quiescent state,-granted; but such preternatural workings, as well as the character and frame of mind proper for them, must leave their shadowings and lofty traces behind them. The face that has once held communion with the Most High, or been wrought to madness by deep thought and passion, or that inly broods over its sacred or its magic lore, must be "as a book where one may read strange matters," that cannot be opened without a correspondent awe and reverence. But here is "neither the cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night;" neither the blaze of immediate inspiration nor the hallowed radiance, the mystic gloomy light that follows it, so far as I was able to perceive. I think it idle to say that Michael Angelo painted man in the abstract, and so left expression indeterminate, when he painted prophets and other given characters in particular. He has painted them on a larger scale, and cast their limbs in a gigantic mould to give a dignity and command answering to their situations and high calling, but I do not see the same high character and intensity of thought or purpose impressed upon their countenances. Thus, nothing can be nobler or more characteristic than the figure of the prophet Jeremiah. It is not abstracted, but symbolical of the history and functions of the individual. The whole figure bends and droops, under a weight of wo, like a large willow tree surcharged with showers. Yet there is no peculiar expression of grief in one part more than another; the head hangs down despondingly indeed, but so do the hands, the clothes, and every other part seems to labor under and be involv ed in a complication of distress. Again, the prophet Ezra is represented reading, in a striking attitude of attention, and with the book held close to him as if to lose no part of its contents in empty space-all this is finely imagined and designed, but then the book reflects back none of its pregnant, hieroglyphic meaning on the face, which, though large and stately, is an ordinary, unimpassioned, and even unideal one. Daniel, again, is meant for a face of inward thought and musing, but it might seem as if the compression of the features were produced by external force as much as by involuntary perplexity. I might extend these remarks to this artist's other works; for instance, to the Moses, of which the form and attitude express the utmost dignity and energy of purpose, but the face wants a something of the intelligence and expansive views of the Hebrew legislator. It is cut from the same block, and by the same bold sweeping hand, as the sandals or the drapery. L. Do you think there is any truth or value in the distinction which assigns to Raphael the dramatic, and to Michael Angelo the epic department of the art? H. Very little, I confess. It is so far true, that Michael Angelo painted single figures, and Raphael chiefly groups; but Michael Angelo gave life and action to his figures, though not the same expression to the face. I think this arose from two circumstances. First, from his habits as a sculptor, in which form predominates, and in which the fixed lineaments are more attended to than the passing inflections, which are neither so easily caught nor so well given in sculpture as in painting. Secondly, it strikes me that Michael Angelo, who was a strong iron-built man, sympathized more with the organic structure, with bones and muscles, than with the more subtle and sensitive workings of that fine medullary substance called the brain. He compounded man admirably of brass or clay, but did not succeed equally in breathing into his nostrils the breath of life, of thought or feeling. He has less humanity than Raphael, and I think that he is also less divine, unless it be asserted that the body is less allied to earth than the mind. Expression is, after all, the principal thing. If Michael Angelo's forms have, as I allow, an intellectual character about them and a greatness of gusto, so that you would almost say "his bodies thought," his faces, on the other hand, have a drowsy and material one. For example, in the figure of Adam coming from the hand of his Creator, the composition, which goes on the idea of a being starting into life at the touch of Omnipotence, is sublime :-the figure of Adam reclined at ease with manly freedom and independence, is worthy of the original found. er of our race; and the expression of the face, implying passive resignation and the first consciousness of existence, is in thorough keeping-but I see nothing in the countenance of the Deity denoting supreme might and majesty. The Eve, too, lying extended at the foot of the Forbidden Tree, has an elasticity and buoyancy about it, that seems as if it could bound up from the earth of its own accord, like a bow that was bent. It is all life and grace. The action of the head thrown back, and the upward look, correspond to the rest. The artist was here at home. In like manner, in the allegorical figures of Night and Morn at Florence, the faces are ugly or distorted, but the contour and actions of the limbs express dignity and power in the very highest degree. The legs of the figure of Night, in particular, are twisted into the involutions of a serpent's folds; the neck is curved like the horse's, and is clothed with thunder. L. What then is the precise difference between him and Raphael, according to your conception ? H. As far as I can explain the matter, it seems to me that Michael Angelo's forms are finer, but that Raphael's are more fraught with meaning; that the rigid outline and disposable masses in the first are more grand and imposing, but that Raphael put a greater proportion of sentiment into his, and calls into play every faculty of the mind and body of which his characters are susceptible, with greater subtilty and intensity of feeling. Dryden's lines, "A fiery soul that working out its way And o'er-inform'd the tenement of clay-" do not exactly answer to Raphael's character, which is mild and thoughtful rather than fiery; nor is there any want either of grace or grandeur in his figures: but the passage describes the "o'er-informing" spirit that breathes through them, and the unequal struggle of the expression to vent itself by more than ordinary physical means. Raphael lived a much shorter time than Michael Angelo, who also lived long after him; and there is no comparison between the number, the variety, or the finished elegance of their work.* Michael Angelo possibly lost himself * The oil-pictures attributed to Michael Angelo are meagre and pitiful; |