is represented standing on an altar. His left foot is raised upon the skull of an ox; his head is slightly bent, and the whole attitude suggests a few moments of rest while he contemplates his coming fate. The conception is as fine as the subject is rare. The artist should glorify death if possible, but he can only do this when the subject has a general application. Many painters have introduced the Angel of Death into scenes where death has occurred, and have thus converted them into work of pathos and beauty. Notable examples of this are Watts's Death, the Friend, already referred to, and H. Levy's Young Girl and Death, where the Angel gently clasps the body of a girl whose face is hidden. One of the finest designs of the kind is Lard's Glory Forgets not Obscure Heroes. On a battlefield, where all else has gone, lies the body of a soldier over whom stoops a lovely winged figure who raises the head of the hero, and seems to throw a halo of glory over him.a In historical paintings the appearance of sleep is often given to a dead body, as in Cogniet's Tintoretto Painting his Dead Daughter, a pathetic picture, bringing to mind the story of Luca Signorelli painting his dead son.b a The design for this picture was probably suggested by Longepied's fine sculptured group of Immortality at the Louvre, the idea of which was no doubt drawn from Canova's L'Amour et Psyche. There are Tangara groups and fragments of larger works in existence showing that the Greeks executed many designs of a similar character. b See also Girodet's Burial of Atala, and Le Brun's Death of Cato. CHAPTER XII LANDSCAPE Limitations of the landscape painter-Illusion of opening distanceIllusion of motion in landscape-Moonlight scenes-Transient conditions. CONSIDERED as a separate branch of the painter's art, landscape is on a comparatively low plane, because the principal signs with which it deals, and the arrangement of them to form a view, may be varied indefinitely without a sense of incongruity arising. Thus there can be no ideal in the art; that is to say, no ideal can be conceived which is general in its character. The artist can aspire to no definite goal: his imagination is limited to the arrangement of things which are inanimate and expressionless. He may produce sensorial, but not intellectual, beauty. The nobler human attributes and passions, as wisdom, courage, spiritual exaltation, patriotism, cannot be connected with landscape, and so it is unable to produce in the mind the elevation of thought and grandeur of sentiment which are the sweetest blossoms of the tree of art. 6° Another drawback in landscape is the necessity for painting it on an extraordinarily reduced scale. Because of this the highest qualities of beauty in nature grandeur and sublimity-can only with difficulty be suggested on canvas, for actual magnitude is requisite for the production of either of these qualities in any considerable degree. A volcano in eruption has no force at all in a painting, a result which is due, not so much to the inability of the painter to represent moving smoke and fire, as to the impossibility of depicting their enormous masses. The disability of the painter in respect of the representation of magnitude is readily seen in the case of a cathedral interior. This may or may not have the quality of grandeur, but a picture cannot differentiate between one that has, and one that has not, because no feeling of grandeur can arise in looking at a painted interior, the element of actual space being absent. Seeing that an ideal in landscape is impossible, the landscape painter cannot improve upon nature. In the case of the human figure the painter may improve upon experience by collecting excellencies from different models and putting them into one form, thus creating what would be universally regarded as ideal physical beauty; and he may give to this form an expression of spiritual nobility which is also beyond experience because it would imply the absence of inferior qualities inseparable from Thus to the physical, he adds intelSuch a perfect form may be said to be an improvement upon nature, for it is not only beyond experience, but is nature purified. But the landscape painter cannot improve upon the signs which nature provides. He may vary the parts of man in nature. lectual beauty. |