LECTURE IX.

The following lecture might perhaps never have been written, but for a remark in a criticism on one of my own pictures in Mr. Ruskin's Academy Notes for 1875. I am not ashamed to confess this; I am not over-sensitive, and Mr. Ruskin is welcome to criticise my work as severely as he pleases; no one is more aware of its shortcomings than I am myself, and compared to some of the exhibitors of that year I am let off very easily; for his remarks are fair enough, with the exception alluded to above. and to fair criticism I have no objection, only the more flippant sorts giving me even a passing feeling of annoyance; foolish perhaps, on my part, but unavoidable when the serious work of months is contemptuously dismissed in an epigrammatic paragraph by the ordinary newspaper ignoramus. (ftn. 2)

But the passage in question introduces a name which, as my readers must by this time have discovered, I (and I am not singular in this) hold in more than ordinary reverence; — for Mr. Ruskin to speak of Michelangelo's object in his work being to show us the adaptability of limbs to awkward positions (ftn. 3) indicates a depth of ignorance on his part, wilful or unconscious, that could not be passed over; and its immediate effect was to induce me to read his lecture on Michelangelo and Tintoret, hitherto avoided by me, as, from what I had been told of it, a probable cause of vexation and annoyance. Truly it made me burn with indignation, and, the fire kindling, I felt impelled to point out the glaring perversions which Mr. Ruskin's curious spite against this greatest of artists allowed him to introduce into its pages; and not only this, but I felt it necessary to explain to my students, likely to be misled by his special pleading, the general blindness to the higher qualities of art, which is observable not only in this pamphlet, but in all Mr. Ruskin's later writings, and which is the necessary result of his want of observation of the highest form of natural beauty, and of his ignorance of the practical side of art.

In a previous lecture I have given Mr. Ruskin full credit for the exalted and beautiful spirit which pervades his writings on art, and although I fully suspected and even hinted that the result of his teaching might easily be to supplant, by a canting affection of nature-worship, the direct and healthy study which the nobler forms of art require from a young student, I contented myself with showing (ftn. 4) that the opinions which form the base of his beautiful theories lie outside the dominion of art; and in my respect for his exalted views, his unrivalled power of poetic description, his equally unrivalled erudition, and his knowledge and love of natural history, forbore to press home the mischievous, I may almost say the deadening effect, that such theories must have on minds not masculine enough to be independent. I could hardly, indeed, anticipate that Mr. Ruskin's theories would lead him to such a display of acrimony against the painters who have been generally accepted as holding the highest place in the world of art; but consideration should have made me understand that this is the only logical conclusion to be deduced from his writings; for Mr. Ruskin has so consistently elevated the moral and sentimental side of art over the aesthetic, that we are tempted to suspect him of never having had any perception of beauty in art, as distinguished from beauty in nature; and we may search his later writings in vain for any appreciation of beauty of form or colour. Beautiful colour with him seems synonymous with bright colour, or what he would call pure colour, as typical of purity; where he once thought he saw fine colour in Titian he has since strenuously denied it; and his keen admiration of Turner's later work, which is full of crude contrasts of coarse colour, shows that his appreciation of Bellini's exquisite tones must be a mere accident. Of beauty of form he seems to have no perception whatever; as for the great artistic qualities, design and harmony, if he has ever taken them into consideration, or has ever seen them at all, he has long ago set them aside as valueless. In his first splendid volume even he is apparently blind to those higher beauties in nature which go to the making of good landscape art. The deficiency of Claude's imagination shown in the incongruous materials of which many of his pictures are made up he is careful to point out; but this has made him pass over as of secondary importance the far higher and more subtle imaginative power which enabled Claude to see and to render every phase of the limpid purity of the sky, and the tenderest gradations of luminous atmospheric effect; and you have only to ask yourself what Claude would have been if he had been wanting in this faculty, to understand that the utmost ingenuity in the arrangement and invention of material, and the utmost attention to "earnest work" in detail, would never have made him the great master of landscape that he was. That he is untrue to facts is obvious; how true he is to nature it requires taste and education to perceive.

These deficiencies of perception are the true cause of his want of appreciation of the distinguishing qualities which make Raphael and Michelangelo what they are; and from this point it is only a step downwards to ascribe to them the baseness of intention in their art which is the running accompaniment to all the strictures in his pamphlet. Perhaps I have above (inadvertently) hit on the key-note of his exceptional invective in the case of these two painters, in speaking of them as "generally accepted" as holding the highest rank. I spoke of Mr. Ruskin in my lecture at the Royal Institution (ftn. 5) as the prophet of a new religion, and this is true in a wider sense than I at the time intended; he is not only its prophet but its high-priest. He has the genuine priestly intolerance of independent judgment: partial admission of his doctrine he will not endure; you must accept it in its entirety, Or you are of the enemy; he allows of no independence of opinion gained from experience. That anything should be generally accepted that he has not propounded or asserted to be true is in his eyes the unpardonable sin. Hence the comparison between Michelangelo and Tintoret; Mr. Ruskin invented Tintoret in his Modern Painters (ftn. 6), whereas Michelangelo and Raphael are accepted masters about whom others have ventured to write; and one is irresistibly tempted to believe that for this reason they are disparaged to Tintoret's advantage. "Nearly every existing work by Michelangelo," (ftn. 7) for instance, "is an attempt to execute something beyond his powers, coupled with a feverish desire that his power may be acknowledged." Now see on the next page the delicate distinction — Tintoret is "content to fall short of his ideal." (ftn. 8) Michelangelo, that is to say, aimed higher than he could achieve; Tintoret fell short of achieving what he aimed at. It is useless to waste words on such puerile distinctions. See again, in the same lecture, the amusing paragraph on oil-painting. Mr. Ruskin is here not content with boldly contradicting the well-known remark of Michelangelo that oil-painting is "proper only for women, or idle persons like Fra Sebastiano," by "making the positive statement to you that oil-painting is the art of arts"; (ftn. 9) but even adds in a note, in the authoritative tone in which he generally administers the mental pap, of which (in unhappy contrast, alas ! to his former splendid style) so much of his later writing consists, " I beg that this statement may be observed with attention. It is of great importance." There could hardly be a more ludicrous instance of Mr. Ruskin's self-assertion in the character of a high-priest whose ex cathedra utterances are to be taken in faith; for it is certain that, as far as experience is a qualification, his opinion as to the comparative merits of fresco and oil-painting is absolutely valueless. That he has implicit faith in the docility of his audience is clear; he must be well assured that his disciples will never venture on inquiry for themselves, or he would hardly dare to make the childish assertion that Michelangelo "bandaged the heads" of his figures, as " a cheap means of getting over a difficulty too great for his patience"; the difficulty being the rendering of the hair!

Bat I have, perhaps, said enough by way of preface to the following lecture; it is questionable, indeed, whether it was worth while to say so much, when those who care to read Mr. Ruskin's pamphlet can judge for themselves whether I exaggerate in pointing out the glaring perversions of reasoning which arise from the strange animus pervading it, an animus which it will be charity to put down to the " lunacies of his declining years." (ftn. 10)

In a lecture on the relation between Michelangelo and Tintoret, delivered at Oxford in 1872, Mr. Ruskin put forward views on the subject of the former artist, which were, to say the least of it, in startling contrast to those which he had previously expressed, especially in the second volume of Modern Painters. (ftn. 11) In the remarks which follow, I have no intention of offering a detailed criticism on what Mr. Ruskin has said, but only of correcting, as far as in me lies, certain of the more glaring errors into which his present animosity against Michelangelo has led him. An instance of what I mean occurs in the passage in which he says that "you are accustomed to think the figures of Michelangelo sublime, because they are dark, and colossal, and involved, and mysterious." (ftn. 12) Now any one at all acquainted with the original frescoes of Michelangelo knows that the work is never dark, unless where it has been blackened by the smoke of candles, but that on the contrary the whole tone of colour in his paintings is remarkably silvery and luminous. "Colossal" his figures undoubtedly are, frequently in actual magnitude, and always in style; but this quality has not generally been considered to interfere with sublimity. " Involved " appears to me to have no special meaning as expressive of a figure, unless it be applied to it as part of a group, when I should say if this be a sin, it is one which cannot be avoided where a multitude of figures are grouped together in action; that no one ever " involved " his figures with less sacrifice of clearness than Michelangelo; or if Mr. Ruskin is using the word with a special meaning (and he does not generally use words without one), and wishes to imply by it that the figures are involved or entangled about themselves and so unintelligible, I would answer that such positions are rare, the action of Michelangelo's figures being as a rule conspicuously direct and obvious; and that when they occur, they occur for a reason, as for instance when he wishes to convey the impression of struggling and confusion, as in the groups of lost spirits fighting against the angels, who are beating them down to hell, in the right hand lower portion of the Last Judgment. "Mysterious" again means nothing in this connection. The word might be appropriate to Rembrandt, but never to Michelangelo, who was as precise in his representations of form and expression as Bellini.

Mr. Ruskin's curious animosity against Michelangelo is worth illustrating by two other of his assertions; first, that that artist "understood fresco imperfectly; " and second, that " his fresco is gone in every part of it." (ftn. 13) The latter of these two remarks we all, and he as well as any of us, know to be untrue; though perhaps by never allowing either himself or his own students to look at Michelangelo's works to judge for themselves, he may persuade himself and them to believe it. The first assertion, that Michelangelo understood fresco imperfectly, (which, as a matter of fact, is only true in the most limited sense, and with reference to his first attempt in fresco,) would have been endorsed to a certain extent by Michelangelo himself. On what ground did Bramante persuade Pope Julius to employ Michelangelo on the vault of the Sistine, but that he hoped to bring him to shame through his inexperience in fresco, and so exalt his kinsman Raphael over his head? (ftn. 14) and on what but the same ground did Michelangelo first refuse the work, (ftn. 15) and then give it up after he had completed about a third of the painting? (ftn. 16) But Mr. Ruskin also accuses him of being a bad workman in fresco: as to how far this is true there may be differences of opinion. Small portions of the painting on the ceiling have faded, but how much of this has occurred through imperfect knowledge of the material, and how much from the penetration of damp through the roof and walls, I am not aware; he would not in any case be much to blame if some of his work had faded through his imperfect acquaintance with a material, in which he was forced to experiment against his will.

Large portions of the ceiling are doubtless much covered with small cracks, chiefly in the neighbourhood of the Temptation of Adam and Eve and of the Deluge, the finest part of the work he attacked. This is due to some fault in the plaster, difficult for an inexperienced hand to foresee; we find the second half of the fresco, however, very free from these cracks; the larger ones throughout are formed by the slight settlement of the building, or perhaps by the expansion and contraction of the roof under the heat of the sun; and some again may have been made by the explosion in the Castle of Saint Angelo, which by shaking out a large mass of plaster destroyed one of the figures above the Delphic Sibyl. In other respects the ceiling of the Sistine is remarkable for the perfection of its preservation. Most of it looks as if it were only just finished, and of this I can speak from knowledge, having drawn from it. Not so however with the painting of the Last Judgment, which is much obscured and difficult to see in places, but not through any failure in the painting. One or two small portions may show traces of fading or scaling off; for example, some of the figures in the left hand upper corner appear to be imperfect from this cause; but for this, without examination of the picture itself, it is difficult to judge how far the painter is to blame. On the other hand, this painting is almost entirely free from cracks; while for the damage it has suffered from the smoke of candles, from ill-treatment in the middle part where the Pope's canopy is placed against it, or from repainting, even Mr. Ruskin would hardly impute blame to Michelangelo. In any case to admit, or even to insist on, these rare and trifling defects in preservation (even supposing the fault to be Michelangelo's own), is a very different thing to asserting that his fresco is defaced in every part of it.

But the first on the list of Michelangelo's faults is that he is a bad workman; that is, I suppose, he tried to do what he could not do, or could not do what he tried to do. (ftn. 17) If on this point Mr. Rusk in is right, we must differ entirely on the meaning of good work. If a combination of the most exquisite finish in drawing and modelling, which allows the work to bear the closest inspection in its details, with the utmost simplicity, breadth, and clearness of effect in a distant view, constitute, as I believe they do, the elements of perfect work, I must assert positively that Michelangelo is the most perfect of workmen.

Examine the Last Judgment; through all its multitude of figures, from the highest to the lowest point, and into its extremest corners; and you will hardly find a face, a hand, a foot, a limb, or the smallest portion of a figure, no matter how difficult to execute, or how unimportant in its place in the composition, which is not carried to the highest point of modelling. The expression ol every face, the movement of every finger, the subtle turns of torso and limb, are as exact, as individual, and as perfect in beauty of form, in the thronging figures which make up the crowd that stands beyond the principal circle, as in the central forms of the saints and martyrs crying out for salvation in the very face of Christ Himself; or as in those of the dead rising from the graves, which, being the nearest to the eye, are necessarily carried as far in finish as possible. On these points the photographs from the Sistine frescoes, which are now well known to all lovers of art, furnish a complete refutation of all that Mr. Ruskin has written about them. If I pursue the examination of his remarks any further, it is not so much to point out the evasions, or rather perversions, of the real facts of the matter, into which he has been led by his desire to depreciate Michelangelo, as to bring out as prominently as I can what I consider the truth upon the subject, in order that some may in this way be led to the study of the works themselves.

A detailed defence of the scheme of the Last Judgment would be superfluous; ignorant people who attempt to criticise such a work have what they might perhaps consider an opinion about it; but Mr. Ruskin is not ignorant; he has chosen, nevertheless, to put forward an opinion, which, though arrived at by much apparent consideration, is not far removed from the most ill-considered judgments that have been passed upon it. Or rather he has had two opinions; his first opinion having been given in language which would lead one to infer that it is, if not the mightiest, at any rate one of the mightiest, creations of human intellect. But "we have changed all that." The truth of the matter is, that to the art of the work Mr. Ruskin's eyes were never opened; what he once admired was the idea, and the impressive effect produced on the mind by the imaginative power of the artist; and this led him to assign to its creator the great qualities which he now denies him. He now does not admire the idea, and he thinks the impression produced is a false and dangerous one, and therefore not only assigns to him every artistic crime, but even infers personal poverty of character. (ftn. 18)

Having been ever blind to the art, he does not see that this remains the same in spite of his own change of views. He goes further; he not only denies that the art is good, because he cannot see and never has seen it; but he virtually and in principle denounces all art as it has been hitherto understood from the beginning of the world until now. He does not say: I mean one thing by art and you another; he says: I will have no art; workmanship I allow and require, but not art of a higher kind. Of the higher art, in fact, which studies nature, not for the mere object of studying, but in order to know nature for the sake of selecting what is good and rejecting what is bad, Mr. Ruskin knows nothing, or at all events allows nothing. Such art, we are to believe, the great painter is distinctly not to practise. Correggio is not to see nature deliriously; Raphael is not to see it gracefully; Michelangelo is not to see it sublimely. (ftn. 19) This assertion that the artist is to have no independence of idea is continued throughout the lecture on Michelangelo and Tintoret, and in the pamphlet on the Academy, published in 1875.

In the former we find it dogmatically asserted that the representation of inaction or continuous action, and not of momentary action, is the attribute of good art; (ftn. 20) from which it follows that " the introduction of strong or violently emotional incident is at once a confession of inferiority." Therefore, Mr. Ruskin would continue, although it must be allowed that it is not possible always literally to observe these conditions, if an artist ventures to represent the murderer of a saint performing his deed in any but an impassive manner, in any way in fact but as Bellini has painted the murder of Peter Martyr, in the least successful part of one of the loveliest pictures in the world, (ftn. 21) he has at once confessed his inferiority. The necessary conclusion from this would be that Michelangelo is an inferior artist, not because he conceives his subjects in a way that is false to general nature (the true definition, by the way, of a bad artist), but because he does not take the view of the treatment which Mr. Ruskin affirms to be the only view admissible.

If Mr. Ruskin could speak his real mind about the Last Judgment it would probably be something to this effect: "I deny the right of Michelangelo not only to treat the subject of the Last Judgment in a way in which it does not appeal to me, but I deny his right to treat the nude figure at all; I have never cared to study the nude figure, and have no perception or appreciation of its beauty; when I speak of the glory of nature and of God's works, I exclude the human figure both male and female, and refer you to mossy rocks and birds'-nests, sunset skies, red herrings by Hunt, robin redbreasts, anything you like, in fact, but the figure for its beauty. If, therefore, an artist paints the nude figure, it must be because 'he delights in the body for its own sake '(a terrible crime, truly),' to exhibit the action of its skeleton and the contours of its flesh; ' " and as he affirms in the Academy Notes (when he has had more time to consider the degraded motives of the unhappy Michelangelo), "to show the adaptability of limbs to awkward positions."

Now there is not the slightest objection to the admission that Michelangelo " delighted in the body for its own sake; " whether such an admission be made on his behalf, or on that of Phidir.s and the whole Greek school, the merit of whose works we must remember Mr. Ruskin considers to be independent of their beauty. (ftn. 22) In Mr. Ruskin's opinion, however, the introduction of the human figure is only to be permitted "in its subordination," which, as he explains it, means the place it occupies among ascetic painters, and such as knew not how to give it its proper, much less its most beautiful, form and action.

The matter resolves itself then into the question, Is it or is it not an artistic error or crime to give (in Mr. Ruskin's words) action to a figure " to show its beauty"? I would just remark here in a parenthesis, that there is a vast difference between this idea and that of giving action "to show the adaptability of limbs to awkward positions," the last accusation brought against Michelangelo;— and in the same breath against myself, who only humbly try to place my figures in the most likely positions they would take under given conditions. But is it wrong to give action to a figure to show its beauty? If the action is untrue to the idea which the artist wishes to express by it, it is undoubtedly wrong. No amount of admirable execution or perception of the beauty of the figure, can possibly excuse disobedience to the higher truths of expression. This is the first rule: the action of a figure must be true to itself. The neglect of this rule, wilful or unconsidered, has been the cause of all the odious mannerisms of the later Italian and French schools; the endeavour, generally very unsuccessful, to give beauty and grace independently of nature, was the cause of the decadence of high art in those schools from the death of Raphael (it began long before the death of Michelangelo) through more than two centuries, till it reached its lowest depth in the affected inanities of Boucher and other painters of the time of Louis XV. Again, the action must be true to the idea to be expressed in the general composition or conception of the subject. This rule I place second; partly because many positions may be equally expressive, so that no one can be said to be truer than another; partly because in some forms of composition intended to be decorative, a certain licence may be allowed \ not indeed a licence of choosing a position which is untrue, but of admitting one which may not be the most probable under the circumstances. (ftn. 23) This freedom must however be used with caution, and as a rule the most probable action is the one to be adopted. These two points then being well considered, the third condition, that which distinguishes the true artist from the mere painter possessed of poetic conceptions, is that the action of the figure shall be expressed in the most beautiful manner, and shall be studied so as to give the artist an opportunity for the display of the highest beauty of the form, whether it be nude or draped.

Now all these conditions Michelangelo fulfilled in a higher degree than any artist that has lived since the best Greek period. It is quite certain however that the observance of these rules and conditions is not sufficient to account for the individuality and superiority of his genius. They are the conditions under which all great painters work. No one can be called an artist of the higher kind who does not clothe his ideas in a beautiful form. The beauty of the idea is the common property of the poet and the artist; the difference lies in the method of treatment, and it is quite possible for a painter to have a most imaginative and poetical mind, without possessing the power of giving beauty to his work.

For inexhaustible invention in the treatment of subjects, combined with the most intense dramatic power of forcing the reality of scenes upon the spectator, no one ever surpassed Albert Dürer. He had the faculty, perhaps in a higher degree than any other artist, of bringing home to his own mind the very essence of the drama he is representing. If he had actually seen the tragedies of the Passion, and noted them on the spot, they could not have been made more real to us than as he has presented them in the splendid series of drawings in the Albertina Museum at Vienna; (ftn. 24) although he uses none of the conventional means of making us feel the situation, either in its terror, as in the Crucifixion, or in its pathos as in the Entombment, or its ignominy as in the Ecce Homo. He rises very nearly even to the higher qualities of design in the Deposition, and quite in the Flagellation; while as a workman in the lower but very necessary sphere of complete and delicate execution, few have rivalled him. As a rule, however, his absolute want of perception of beauty makes us feel that in the sense in which we admire a third-rate Italian artist of the fifteenth century, we have to reject Albert Diirer altogether. This is the meaning of Michelangelo's words with regard to him and to German art in general. In a conversation with Vittoria Colonna and others, he says, "You will find that he who was only a pupil in Italy has produced more with regard to genuine art than the master who is not from Italy. So true is this that Albert Diirer, even when wishing to deceive us, could paint nothing in which I could not observe at once that it neither came from Italy nor from an Italian artist .... we feel at once the difference."

This difference that we feel at once is the want of the sense of beauty. It has nothing to do with the want of power to draw correctly, for Mantegna was scarcely more able to put his figures in right proportion than Albert Dürer. This artist in wealth of imagination, in dramatic power and ingenuity of invention, corresponds very closely with Albert Dürer. He also had a kindred love of dwelling on minute detail, and that searching desire to develop and bring into evidence the most unimportant accidents, which gives to his and to Albert Dürer's draperies the same angular and broken character. Yet in Mantegna's work we feel the sense of beauty pervading it to the smallest detail. In this very matter of draperies there is a light fluttering beauty in Mantegna which is in the happiest contrast to the ponderous clumsiness of Albert Dürer. In Mantegna the draperies express, as if by instinct, the limbs and movements. In Albert Dürer they weigh down the figures with their cumbrous folds, and seem wherever possible to contradict with an awkward contrariety their expression and action. For beauty of action, too, Mantegna is unsurpassed, even among Italian painters (witness the nymphs dancing in the beautiful picture of Apollo and the Muses in the Louvre), while Albert Dürer, vigorous as the action of his figures is, never in his life put the beauty of animation into his heavily moving persons. This is the difference, and it is a most important one to remember, between the complete artist and the man of ideas who paints. Ideas we must have, and the power of expressing them we must have, in all work that is not merely imitative; but the art consists in clothing these ideas in a beautiful form. When we add to these conditions a profound and thorough knowledge of nature, so as to add the power of expressing in perfection the promptings of a lofty imagination and instincts of beauty, we have the highest of which art is capable. Ideas and instincts of beauty we find in all the best Italian art, but a complete knowledge of nature only in one man. This it is really which raises Michelangelo above all the other Italian artists; and the reason why Michelangelo learned the body " essentially from the corpse," and studied its mechanism in death, was that he might have the power to express it living; (ftn. 25) not, as Mr. Ruskin insists, for the mere sake of display.

The genius of Michelangelo consisted, first, in the gift of concentrating his powers on the single important point of expression, so that he had no need of accessories to help him out with his story; and next in something which i; higher than that, something which defies analysis, which has been expressed as "Titanic" and "colossal," and which Mr. Ruskin in his previous writings has described as an " inexplicable power proceeding from an imaginative perception almost superhuman which goes whither we cannot follow." All this undoubtedly places him on the solitary mountain height, where he reigns apart from and above other mortals, but all this, be it remembered, must have remained unexpressed but for the knowledge which alone enabled him to express it. And more than this, too, without something of that same knowledge in the student, the highest qualities of Michelangelo's works must ever remain, a sealed book to him. Without being acquainted by study with the capabilities for beauty, force, and activity in the human figure, we can never know how absolutely founded on nature, how true to nature in respects inconceivable to the mind untrained in this direction, is every figure that Michelangelo ever produced. For this reason the imagination displayed by Michelangelo in the art of his work, quite a distinct matter from that displayed in the treatment of the subject, is beyond the apprehension of those who have not made the human figure a subject of practical study.

As far however as Michelangelo's genius is capable of analysis, it is possible to point out wherein lies his marvellous power of impressing us; the innate genius escapes us, the calculated effects we may discover. First among these calculated effects comes the point to which all his study and all his powers were directed, after considering the best method of carrying out his conception of the subject; this was the endeavour (which Mr. Ruskin condemns) to give the best action to his figures which should show their beauty; or, in simpler words, he desired, as other painters desire, to express his idea by the most beautiful treatment. As however he considered figures the highest means of telling a story, and never condescended to help himself out by other means, he treated all his subjects with figures only, and his attention was concentrated on the most beautiful form, action, and expression which he could give to them. But on one point he never fails; the thought is never lost sight of, the idea is always paramount; the figure is never, as Mr. Ruskin pretends to think, posed only for its beauty; some natural and appropriate intention is the basis of every figure he ever painted. In the series of nude figures in the vault of the Sistine, which are purely decorative as regards their introduction and position, answering, as they do, to the figures of genii and angels so common on Classic and Italian architectural friezes, there is always, beyond the mere intention of beautiful arrangement, some leading idea to be expressed. If the figure is to express repose, it expresses it absolutely; the repose is deep and contemplative. In activity the figure is full of life and youth and spirits; in wearisome labour, it is colossal in build, and struggles under the burden, thus expressing the idea in the most forcible way. If fatigue and pain are to be expressed, the head and body are those of a beautiful youth, so that the feeling of pity is doubly awakened. And here I would draw attention to the way in which the face is always with Michelangelo the first idea. So far from neglecting the face for the body, as Mr. Ruskin asserts, no one ever made the body answer so completely to the expression of the face; without the face the movements of the body I allow may be made unintelligible, as in the preposterous engravings after Michelangelo which, before the Sistine Chapel was photographed, were all the untravelled artist had to guide his appreciation; but the expression of the face explains everything. The beauty of his faces may however be a matter of opinion; Mr. Ruskin says he never could help making them satyrlike; and as an illustration curiously adduces the Oxford drawing, No. 9 in Mr. Robinson's Catalogue, a head strongly expressive of pride and malevolence, (ftn. 26) the precise contrary to everything we imagine as satyric; Satanic is perhaps the word he meant to use.

Upon this point of expression we observe a most interesting change which took place during the progress of the ceiling. At first the treatment of the figures is more purely decorative, their expression and sentiment being however always appropriate to the occasion, and the feeling of real humanity, of thoughtfulness, combined with gentle melancholy, taking the place of the merely abstract expressionless form which had hitherto been considered sufficient for such a purely decorative treatment. But this, although it is the essence of the beauty with which the figures impress us, is secondary to the idea of design and arrangement; while as we advance the importance of the idea increases, so that although they still are placed in pairs and balance each other completely in line and mass, as decorative figures should, the idea of representing some mood or passion gains ground and becomes the paramount idea, the purely decorative intention taking in its turn a subordinate place. This is the aim of Michelangelo in these groups, and not, if I may be allowed to refer again to Mr. Ruskin, the desire to show adaptability of limbs to awkward positions; no, not in these nor in any group or figure he painted in the whole of his life.

Again, as regards his intention, his calculated effect in the treatment of figures, observe the figure of the Messiah in the Last Judgment. He feels that here in this multitude of figures, the head and the central position alone are insufficient to express the might and power of Christ, so that the whole of his energies are directed to making a body of colossal and simple grandeur exceeding in majesty of form all around Him. The head does not represent the Christ that we know by tradition; it has been likened to that of a Jupiter or an Apollo. We, according to our various conceptions of the relations of God to man, may have our own views as to whether this is an adequate representation of the Christ that Christians adore, and to many the simple gentleness of early treatment may be more appropriate. Michelangelo had to consider what he could best express in that tremendous scene, and what he has chosen to represent is the power to command the dead to rise, to condemn the sinful, and to raise the righteous; and it is that power that we feel in the magnificent figure of the Christ. It is to me the culmination of this gigantic work, and it seems but feeble and foolish to stand before it, and speak of the "confession of inferiority " in the introduction of strong and emotional incident.

I must explain before I conclude, that I do not misunderstand what Mr. Ruskin means, when he speaks of this "confession of inferiority " in comparison with the serenity of Bellini, which he considers a higher attribute than the tumult of Michelangelo's art. He has, as is often the case, confused two ideas. The idea of Bellini living his ninety years, painting his lovely and peaceful pictures (for no pictures are so lovely, and to see Bellini's work at Venice for the first time is a revelation of beauty), his tender Madonnas and angels who " sing as calmly as the Fates weave," in scenes where everything goes on without gesture or effort, is so attractive to him, that he does not perceive, that though all this makes Bellini more exclusively an artist than painters who are more disturbed by the world, it does not necessarily make him a greater artist. It is with this misunderstanding that he places this gentle nature higher than the passionate mind, whose stormy energy is reflected from all his works. After all, is Michelangelo less of an artist because he had not that tranquil power of abstraction, and because the sadness of his mind shows itself as a pervading characteristic of his faces? Is he the worse artist because at a distracting time he devoted his best energies with passionate love to the defence of his beloved native city, and only stole away in secret and at night to work on the statues for the family to which politically he was opposed, but which he cherished in his memory as that of his benefactors? I confess I think not. Surely that the sorrow and conflicting emotions of those moments should burn in the cold marble of those solemn figures in the Mausoleum of the Medici, will never again be considered an expression of inferiority. Surely the "shadowed face" of Duke Lorenzo (ftn. 27) never has till now, and never will again, be made by any one the subject of a sneer.

In happiest contrast to Mr. Ruskin's rancorous criticism is the sympathetic essay on Michelangelo by M. Charles Clement, first written for the Revue des Deux Mondes, and published in a small volume together with similar short notices of Lionardo da Vinci and Raphael. These three notices are remarkable, not only for the beautiful spirit in which they are written, but for the justice with which the three characters are compared and analysed. The passage on the Medici monuments is worth quoting at length, if only to lead students who do not know M. Clément's book to read it for themselves: —

"Rien ne prête à l'émotion dans cette chapelle, claire, blanche et froide; et, cependant, qui pourrait voir les statues de Julien, de Laurent, les quatre figures allégoriques qui décorent deux par deux les sarcophages, sans être fortement et profondément ému? Michelange ne s'est pas arrêté aux portraits de ses modèles. Dans le tombeau de Jules II., Rachel et Lia representent la vie active et la vie contemplative; dans le tombeau des Médicis, les figures de Julien et Laurent personnifient la pensée et l’action. Les quatre allégories, — L'Aurore et le Crépuscule, le Jour et la Nuit, — rappellent les phases principales et la rapidité de la destinée de l'lhomme. Les deux figures de Julien et de Laurent sont assises. Julien est jeune, digne et hardi ; il est armé, et appuie son bâton de commandement sur ses genoux. Laurent (ftn. 28) est plongé dans une sombre méditation; sa tête, pleine de pensées, est soutenue sur sa main; le doigt sur les lèvres semble vouloir arrêter jusqu'au murmure de la respiration. Est-ce la mine de Florence qu'il regarde de ses yeux absorbés et profonds? Que dire de la majesté et de la puissance de la statue du Jour, de la titanique beauté de celle de la Nuit, de la grace sérieuse de l'Aurore, qui s'éveille avec tristesse dans un monde de douleurs? La langue est impuissante à, expliquer les idées que l'art représente; mais le public [not having Mr. Ruskin as a guide] ne se méprit pas un instant sur la signification de ces figures; il appela la statue de Laurent II Pensieroso, le Penseur. La figure de la Nuit fit une si vive et si universelle impression, qu'une foule de poëtes s'empressèrent de la célébrer." Then follow the well-known stanzas attributed to Strozzi, and Michelangelo's verses in reply, "qui sont peut-etre les plus beaux qu'il ait écrits, et qui témoignent dans quel trouble de cœur et d'esprit il avait conçu et achevé son plus parfait ouvrage de sculpture."

I am aware that in Mr. Ruskin's voluminous writings (and I do not pretend to have read half that he has written), may be found passages innumerable conveying to the reader a completely different impression of his views from those which he has put forward in his pamphlet on Michelangelo and Tintoret. But it is difficult not to believe that he has in this spoken out his heart; moreover, he has in his later writings denied much of what he wrote in the Modern Painters. I cannot however resist closing this paper by quoting the whole of Mr. Ruskin's first opinion about Michelangelo, often alluded to in these lectures, which some of his readers may by this time have forgotten, which he himself perhaps has forgotten; and in doing this I cannot but think that I am not only not doing Mr. Ruskin an injustice, but that I am rendering him the best service in my power : " Yet Mino stopped at the human nature; he saw the soul, but not the ghostly presences about it; it was reserved for Michelangelo to pierce deeper yet, and to see the indwelling angels. No man's soul is alone; Laocoon or Tobit, the serpent has it by the heart or the angel by the hand; the light or the fear of the spiritual things that move beside it may be seen on the body; and that bodily form with Buonarotti, white, solid, distinct, material, though it be, is invariably felt as the instrument or the habitation of some infinite, invisible power. The earth of the Sistine Adam that begins to burn; the woman-embodied burst of adoration from his sleep; the twelve great torrents of the Spirit of God that pause above us there, urned in their vessels of clay; the waiting in the shadow of futurity of those through whom the Promise and Presence of God went down from the Eve to the Mary, each still and fixed, fixed in his expectation, silent, foreseeing, faithful, seated each on his stony throne, the building stones of the word of God, building on and on, tier by tier, to the Refused one, the head of the corner; not only these, not only the troops of terror torn up from the earth by the four-quartered winds of the Judgment, but every fragment and atom of stone that he ever touched became instantly inhabited by what makes the hair stand up and the words be few ; the St. Matthew, not yet disengaged from his sepulchre, bound hand and foot by his grave-clothes, it is left for us to loose him ; the strange spectral wreath of the Florence Pieta, casting its pyramidal, distorted shadow, full of pain and death, among the faint purple lights that cross and perish under the obscure dome of Sta. Maria del Fiore ; the white lassitude of joyous limbs, panther-like, yet passive, fainting with their own delight, that gleam among the pagan formalisms of the Uffizii, far away, separating themselves in their lustrous lightness, as the waves of an Alpine torrent do by their dancing from the dead stones, though the stones be as white as they ; and finally, and perhaps more than all, those four ineffable types, not of darkness nor of day, not of morning nor of evening, but of the departure and the resurrection, the twilight and the dawn of the souls of men, together with the spectre sitting in the shadow of the niche above them ; all these, and all else that I could name of his forming, have borne, and in themselves retain and exercise, the same inexplicable power — inexplicable because proceeding from an imaginative perception almost superhuman, which goes whither we cannot follow, and is where we cannot come ; throwing naked the final, deepest root of the being of man, whereby he grows out of the invisible, and holds on his God home."

Footnotes:

1. Given at the opening of the fifth session of the Slade School, October, 1875.

2. “Voilà les gens qui nous jugent, qui nous insultent . . . . Sans avoir rien appris, rien vu, impudents et ignorants" . . "nous qui avons travaillé trente ans, étudié, comparé, qui arrivons devant le public avec une œuvre qui, si elle n'est pas parfaite, mon Dieu ! je le sais bien, est au moins honnête, conscientieuse, faite avec le respect qu'on doit avoir de l'art." Thus Ingres on critics in general in his righteous anger at some unconsidered criticisms on Raphael by no less a person than M. Thiers, who set up as an art-critic. (L’Atelier d'Ingres, by Amaury Duval.) As a rule English art-critics start on their career by criticising the Exhibitions, and trust to time and chance hints for learning something about art. One of these gentlemen, who writes in a leading paper, unfortunately tried his "prentice hand " on the Exhibition of Old Master Drawings at the Grosvenor Gallery last winter (1879); and in making his selection for special praise and (if I remember right) for only mention among the drawings of Michelangelo, chose not only the two which were undoubtedly not genuine, but despising the warning in the Catalogue that one of them was a copy, committed himself to saying that the owner was mistaken in not ascribing it to the Master; — the original being all the time in the Academy Exhibition, and nothing less than the celebrated "Arcieri" or Archers, from Windsor, perhaps the best known of Michelangelo's drawings. I may add that to any but an ignoramus, there was no possible mistake as to the copy being a copy, though a very good one. "Voila les gens," &c.

3. "Of course Mr. Poynter's object is to show us, like Michelangelo, the adaptability of limbs to awkward positions." — Academy Notes for 1875, p. 16.

4. See ante, pp. 78 et seq.: "I only say it is beside the question, and may easily lead to false conclusions in art. It is not that I hold the error to lie," &c. And in the next paragraph, "I can indeed conceive of no writing," &c.

5. See ante, p. 76.

6. In those enchanting chapters on the Imaginative Faculty at the end of the second volume.

7. Michelangelo and Tintoret, p. 18.

8. Ibidem, p. 19, and again on the same page. "Both Raphael and Michelangelo are always in dramatic attitudes, and always appealing to the public for praise."

9. Michelangelo and Tintoret, p. 25. It is highly characteristic that Mr. Ruskin should have omitted all but the first part of this well-known and often-quoted apothegm; and it may be as well to point out that the remark was rather intended as a sarcasm on Sebastian del Piombo's laziness than as the sweeping disparagement of oil-painting which Mr. Ruskin pretends it to be; the nature of oil-painting allowing the work to be dropped and taken up again at will, and so making it suitable for women (who may be supposed to be liable to interruption from other occupations) and for idle persons; fresco-painting on the other hand requiring continuous and concentrated effort, on account of the limited time during which the plaster remains in fit condition to be worked on, after which it can never be touched again, — except by a different process which takes from its special character. See Duppa's Life of Michelangelo, p. 209. Mr. Ruskin proceeds to point out that Michelangelo said this "because he had neither the skill to lay a single touch of good oil-painting, nor the patience to overcome its elementary difficulty."

10. Academy Notes for 1875, p. 11.

11. The reader will find Mr. Ruskin's original opinion regarding Michelangelo given in full at the end of this lecture.

12. Sec Mr. Ruskin's lecture on Michelangelo and Tintoret, p. 37.

13. Michelangelo and Tintoret, p. 26. See also p. 16. All that he did "on a large scale in colour is in the best qualities of it perished."

14. Condivi, Vita di M. Buonarotti, par. xxxiii., also Vasari's Life.

15. Condivi, "Scusandosi che non era sua arte, eche non riuscirebbe."

16. See Vasari's Life of Michelangelo.

17. Michelangelo and Tintoret, p. 18.

18. For instance, "He has a feverish desire that his power may be acknowledged." "He is always in dramatic attitudes, and always appealing to the public for praise." Michelangelo and Tintoret, p. 19. It is worth while to compare with this a note to a passage in vol. ii. of the Modern Painters, wherein Mr. Ruskin sums up the imaginative faculty. The passage runs thus: — "Sympathy it desires — but can do without; of opinions it is regardless, not in pride, but because it is conscious of a rule of action and object of aim in which it cannot be mistaken; partly also in pure energy of desire, and longing to do and to invent more and more, which suffer it not to suck the sweetness of praise — unless a little with the end of the rod in its hand, and without pausing in its march." And now the note: — "That which we know of the lives of Michelangelo and Tintoret is eminently illustrative of this temper."

19. "Holman Hunt was the first assertor in painting, as I believe I myself was in art-literature," .... "that things should be painted as they probably did look and happen, and not as by the rules of art developed under Raphael, Correggio, and Michelangelo, they might be supposed gracefully, deliriously, or sublimely to have happened." — Academy Notes for 1875.

20. "A continuous, not momentary action, — or entire inaction. You are to be interested in the living creations; not in what is happening to them." — Michelangelo and Tintoret, p. 15. Why not in both?

21. "Bellini's treatment of violence you may see exemplified in a notable way in St. Peter. Martyr; the soldier is indeed striking his sword down into his breast, but in the face of the saint is only resignation, and faintness of death, not pain; — that of the executioner is impassive." — Ibid. p. 16.

22. "He (the Greek) rules over the arts to this day, and will for ever, because he ought not first for beauty, not first for passion, or for invention, but for Rightness." — Aratra Penteliri, par. 200, p. 198, and passim. All good art has sought for what Mr. Ruskin calls "Rightness"; the Creek of course excels by the completeness of his sense ot beauty of form, and the un urpassable perfection of execution.

23. As when the artist has to fill a decorative panel of unsuitable form, which occasionally may happen.

24. Photographed and published by the Autotype Company.

25. "Michelangelo and Raphael drew the body from vanity and from knowledge of it dead." — Michelangelo and Tmtoret, p. 30. "Raphael and Michelangelo learned it essentially from the corpse, and had no delight in it whatever, but great pride in showing that they knew all its mechanism." — Ibidem, p. 31.

26. Michelangelo and Tintoret, p. 33.

27. This "shadowed face" is cited by Mr. Ruskin to illustrate the third of Michelangelo's crimes, as expressing "physical instead of mental interest"; and he goes on to sneer at the unfinished head of the Twilight. Students of Michelangelo's life will remember the conditions, referred to in the text, under which these monuments were executed.

28. As Mr. Ruskin points out, the names for these two statues should be reversed. Giuliano, not Lorenzo, is "II Pensieroso."