Hundreds stand enchanted before
it, and declare it imbodies their highest ideal of art and religion;
and I suppose it does.
But so it always is. The man who has exquisite
gifts of expression passes for more, popularly, than the man with
great and grand ideas who utters but imperfectly. There are some
pictures here by Correggio - a sleeping Venus and Cupid - a marriage of
the infant Jesus and St. Catharine. This Correggio is the poet of
physical beauty. Light and shadow are his god. What he lives for is,
to catch and reproduce fitting phases of these. The moral is nothing
to him, and, in his own world, he does what he seeks. He is a great
popular favorite, since few look for more in a picture than exquisite
beauty understood between us that his sphere is to be earth, and not
heaven; were he to attempt, profanely, to represent heavenly things, I
must rebel. I should as soon want Tom Moore to write me a prayer book.
A large saloon is devoted to the masters of the French school. The
works of no living artists are admitted. There are some large
paintings by David. He is my utter aversion. I see in him nothing but
the driest imitation of the classics. It would be too much praise to
call it reproduction. David had neither heart nor soul. How could he
be and artist? - he who coolly took his portfolio to the guillotine to
take lessons on the dying agonies of its victims - how could he ever
paint any thing to touch the heart?
In general, all French artists appear to me to have been very much
injured by a wrong use of classic antiquity. Nothing could be more
glorious and beautiful than the Grecian development; nothing more
unlike it that the stale, wearisome, repetitious imitations of it in
modern times. The Greek productions themselves have a living power to
this day; but all imitations of them are cold and tiresome. These old
Greeks made such beautiful things, because they did _not_
imitate. That mysterious vitality which still imbues their remains,
and which seems to enchant even the fragments of their marbles, is the
mesmeric vitality of fresh, original conception. Art, built upon this,
is just like what the shadow of a beautiful woman is to the woman. One
gets tired in these galleries of the classic band, and the classic
headdress, and the classic attitude, and the endless repetition of the
classic urn, and vase, and lamp, as if nothing else were ever to be
made in the world except these things.
Again: in regard to this whole French gallery, there is much of a
certain quality which I find it very difficult to describe in any one
word - a dramatic smartness, a searching for striking and peculiar
effects, which render the pictures very likely to please on first
sight, and to weary on longer acquaintance. It seems to me to be the
work of a race whose senses and perceptions of the outward have been
cultivated more than the deep inward emotions.
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