illustrating either the painter's subsequent practice or his theory, that it need be here quoted in full.

More characteristic is the statement, "I was let into the Cappella Sistina in the morning, and remained there the whole day, a great part of which I spent in walking up and down it with great self-importance. Passing through, on my return, the rooms of Raphael, they appeared of an inferior order." This is especially interesting as giving at once, in a nutshell, Reynolds's view—at any rate, his theoretical view-of the giant of art. The man of calm, benignant temperament, the painter who was to excel in depicting high-bred female loveliness, was less moved by the balance, the rhythmical grace, the divine suavity of Raphael, than by the terribilità, the overwhelming power of Michelangelo, his hero, yet the one master whose unique qualities he could never hope to assimilate, or even superficially to imitate.

And yet there is no valid reason to doubt the sincerity of Sir Joshua's admiration for the mighty Buonarroti, or the attitude of admiring awe which he affected in speaking of, and in contemplating, his works. Still more did our painter, as evidenced over and over again in his Discourses, deem Michelangelo-with what propriety we will not here stay to discuss the proper exemplar and model of young artists, and the master, the contemplation of whose works was best calculated to supply in their training those deficiencies of which he was only too painfully conscious in his own. Leslie and Taylor's often quoted, and often to be quoted, biography, generally so significant in its comment, contains, on the subject of Reynolds's preference of Michelangelo over Raphael, the following passage, the first part of which is as unexceptionable as the latter is utterly inexplicable:-" And yet it would seem that there is the most in common between Reynolds, so pre-eminently happy in

his representations of feminine and infantine grace, and the gentle Raphael. I imagine, however, that the superior powers of Michelangelo in colour (!), and in breadth of chiaroscuro, combined as they are with so many other noble qualities, commanded his homage at first sight, and retained it ever after."

Inferior as Raphael must be held to Titian, Tintoret, and the great Venetians in the special qualities of "colour and breadth of chiaroscuro," nevertheless he, the painter of the Incendio del Borgo," the "Deliverance of St Peter," the "Miracle of Bolsena," the "Heliodorus chased from the Temple," must be held to have surpassed his overwhelming Florentine rival as entirely in chiaroscuro as he does in colour-that is, when we estimate him, as a colourist, apart from those works in which the dark. brush and leathery textures of Giulio Romano, translating his master's conceptions, rob them of half their charm. Michelangelo, who, even in the sublimest creation of a time when so much was great and aspiring-the vault of the Sistine Chapel-mainly preserves the standpoint of the sculptor, never so much aimed at making the fullest use of colour proper, that legitimate weapon, not less of the frescante undertaking monumental decorations than of the painter in tempera or oils. He would doubtless have applauded the famous dictum of Ingres-" Le dessin c'est la probité de l'art;" but scarcely with consistency the corollary of Théophile Thoré (Bürger)—“ Si le dessin est la probité de l'art, la couleur en est la vie."

A word must be said as to those so-called Caricaturas done by Reynolds in Rome, and of which Northcote remarks" I have heard Sir Joshua say that although it was universally allowed he executed such subjects with much humour and spirit, he yet held it absolutely necessary to abandon the practice, since it must corrupt his taste as

a portrait-painter, whose duty it becomes to aim at discovering the perfections only of those whom he is to represent."

This is but an insipid and imperfect theory of the great art of portraiture, and one which, if followed to the letter, would result in the production of lifeless and deplorable platitudes. We must take leave to doubt-Northcote notwithstanding-whether, in the narrow and truncated form here given, it is that of the painter of Sterne, Johnson, Gibbon, and Garrick.

Leonardo da Vinci, to whom we owe the most famous of the world's portraits, the Monna Lisa del Giocondo of the Louvre, was also the greatest among the heroic caricaturists, and indeed, in a sense, the inventor of the style.

To return, however, to these particular caricaturas, the most celebrated is that in which Reynolds more or less humorously portrayed, on the lines and in the postures of Raphael's "School of Athens," a number of those travelling Englishmen of fashion with whom the grand tour was then an obligation, and Rome the central point of their wanderings. Another similar group of satirical portraits, like the foregoing, painted in 1751, is that contributed by the then Duke of Devonshire to the Reynolds Exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, and which had, in 1831, been shown at the British Institution, under the designation: "Portraits of distinguished connoisseurs painted at Rome."

It was while making studies after Raphael in the Stanze of the Vatican, that Reynolds caught so severe a cold that, as its result, he remained deaf for the rest of his life, and was thenceforth condemned to the use of the eartrumpet which came to be considered one of the chief of his outward attributes. Those who are acquainted with Italian galleries in mid-winter, and especially with the

Theoretical Views on Sculpture

23

icy halls of the Vatican, will not find much difficulty in crediting this statement, insufficient as the cause assigned may at first appear.

Reynolds, if he worshipped prostrate the master works of Buonarroti in the Sixtine, did not, so far as can be ascertained, venture upon any copies confining his attention to Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, and noting admiringly, with the widest catholicity of taste, not only those masters, but Correggio, Barroccio, Van Dyck, Poussin, Borgognone, and Claude Lorrain. Equal with these in attraction for him, were seemingly the chief luminaries of the Bolognese school, the Carracci themselves, Guido, Domenichino, Guercino-then still at the apogee of their fame, and perhaps more genuinely admired by the connoisseurs of the day than the great prototypes of the rival schools, whose united excellences they strove to assimilate and give forth anew, but only succeeded in superficially imitating. It is significant and not a little amusing to find Reynolds, the worshipper of Michelangelo and Raphael, captivated by the decorative brilliancy and the agitated naturalism of Bernini as exemplified in a bust of Montoja then in the Church of S. Jacopo degli Spagnuoli, and in the Anima Beata and Anima Damnata in the sacristy of the same church.

For antique sculpture, indeed, even those wonders of the Vatican, then exercising an unrivalled attraction, but since, by modern research and modern appreciation, or rather depreciation, shorn of half their glory, Reynolds would appear to have had but little sympathy. He could, on occasion, express the obligatory enthusiasm for the great sister art, as is shown in the Tenth Discourse, in which, however, his vague and frigid generalisations proves how narrow and confined is his view of its scope, and how imperfectly he understands, outside his own branch, the grand style to which,

according to his precepts, sculpture should exclusively adhere.

The following is a typical passage from the Discourse in question:

"Sculpture is an art of much more simplicity and uniformity than painting; it cannot with propriety, and the best effect, be applied to many subjects.

"The object of its pursuit may be comprised in two words-Form and Character; and those qualities are presented to us but in one manner, or in one style only; whereas the powers of painting, as they are more various and extensive, so they are exhibited in as great a variety of manners.

"The Roman, Lombard, Florentine, Venetian, and Flemish schools all pursue the same end by different means. But sculpture having but one style, can only to one style of painting have any relation; and to this (which is indeed the highest and most dignified that painting can boast) it has a relation so close, that it may be said to be almost the same art operating on different materials."

No doubt, Donatello, and the great Quattrocento schools of Tuscany which radiated from him, may have appeared hard, abrupt, and unideal, at a time when the plastic art was deemed to be in an inchoate stage until it reached, in the first years of the sixteenth century, that climax so soon to be followed by a rapid descent. Still, that his mighty personality, and the art upon which he has left his stamp should apparently make no impression whatever on Reynolds, is not a little strange. He could elsewhere own, though grudgingly and with many reservations, that "simplicity and truth, of which we are now speaking, is oftener found in the old masters that preceded the great age of painting than it ever was in that age,