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composure. But when eminence in art brought him into notice, he resumed the original license of his pen, and hazarded freer thoughts and took bolder liberties with language. His German nature prevailed a little against his English education-and it cannot be denied that it infused a dash of poetic fervour into his lectures and critical compositions.

The sketches and drawings of Fuseli were of a higher order than the works of his pen, and as art speaks a universal language, they were free from those deformities which are so visible in his writings. They exhibited a deep poetic feeling, acquaintance with the poets and historians of old, and a perfect sense of the heroic action and sentiment which the noblest line of art requires. Armstrong, the poet, his friend and counsellor, was not insensible of their excellence, when he joined in persuading him to woo the muse of painting alone. He no sooner formed this resolution than he determined to visit Rome. Armstrong accompanied him, and both used to relate that while they were descanting on the glories of the Eternal City and the splendour of ancient sculpture and modern poetry, their reveries were interrupted by the sudden grounding of the vessel. This happened near Genoa, they took to their boats, landed in safety, and hastened to the capital of art.

Fuseli had from his boyhood admired Michael Angelo in engravings, and he adored him now in his full and undiminished majesty. It was a story which he loved to repeat, how he lay on his back day after day, and week succeeding week, with upturned and wondering eyes, musing on the splendid ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; on the unattainable grandeur of the Florentine. He sometimes, indeed, added, that such a posture of repose was necessary for a body fatigued like his with the pleasant gratifications of a luxurious city. He imagined, at all events, that he drank in as he lay the spirit of the

sublime Michael, and that by studying in the Sistine, he had the full advantage of the mantle of inspiration suspended visibly above him. The flighty imagination of Fuseli required a soberer master; the wings of his fancy were a little too strong sometimes for his judgment, and brought upon him the reproach of extravagance-an error so rare in British art that it almost becomes a virtue. He was no idle votary, for he strove to imitate; he was no ignorant admirer, for he thus praises his great

master.

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Sublimity of conception, grandeur of form, and breadth of manner are the elements of Michael Angelo's style. By these principles he selected or rejected the objects of imitation. As painter, as sculptor, as architect, he attempted, and, above any other man, succeeded, to unite magnificence of plan and endless variety of subordinate parts with the utmost simplicity and breadth. His line is uniformly grand; character and beauty were admitted only so far as they could be made subservient to grandeur; the child, the female, meanness, deformity, were by him indiscriminately stamped with grandeur. A beggar rose from his hand the patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity; his women are moulds of generation; his infants teem with the man; his men are a race of giants. This is the Terribil via' hinted at by Agostino Caracci, though perhaps as little understood by the Bolognese as by the blindest of his Tuscan adorers, with Vasari at their head. He is the inventor of epic painting in that sublime circle of the Sistine Chapel which exhibits the origin, progress, and final dispensation of Theocracy. He has personified motion in the groups of the Cartoon of Pisa; imbodied sentiment in the monuments of St. Lorenzo; unravelled the features of meditation in the prophets and sybils of the Chapel of Sixtus; and in the Last Judgment, with every attitude that

varies the human body, traced the master-trait of every passion that sways the human heart. Though as sculptor he expresses the character of flesh more perfectly than all who came before or after him, yet he never submitted to copy an individual, Julio the Second only excepted, and in him he represented the reigning passion rather than the man. In painting, he contented himself with negative colour, and as the painter of mankind, rejected all meretricious ornament. The fabric of St. Peter, seattered into infinity of jarring parts by Bramanti and his successors, he concentrated, suspended the cupola, and to the most complex gave the air of the most simple of edifices."

This character carries the image of the author's mind; the style, however, is clearer, and the expression less complicated or obscure than was common with Fuseli. No unimaginative dauber ever hid his ignorance of anatomy under a redundancy of drapery, more effectually than this remarkable man could veil ordinary thoughts under colossal words. The reader will thank me for transcribing also the following portrait of Leonardi da Vinci.

"Such was the dawn of modern art when Leonardi da Vinci broke forth with a, splendour which distanced former excellence; made up of all the elements which constitute the essence of genius; favoured by education and circumstances; all ear, all eye, all grasp; painter, poet, sculptor, anatomist, architect, engineer, chemist, mechanist, musician, man of science, and sometimes empiric, he laid hold of every beauty in the enchanted circle-but without exclusive attachment to one, dismissed, in her turn, each. Fitter to scatter hints than teach by example, he wasted life insatiate in experiment. To a capacity which at once penetrated the principle and real aim of art, he joined an inequality of fancy that at one moment lent him wings for the pursuit of beauty, and the next flung him on the

ground to crawl after deformity: we owe him chiaroscuro with all its magic; we owe him caricature with all its incongruities. His notions of the most elaborate finish and his want of perseverance were at least equal. Want of perseverance alone could make him abandon his Cartoon, destined for the great council-chamber at Florence, of which the celebrated contest of horsemen was but one group; for to him who could organize that composition, Michael Angelo himself òught rather to have been an object of emulation than of fear."

Fuseli seldom thought with sober feelings upon either art or literature, and he delighted to invest the objects of his love with the brightness of heaven -those of his hate with the hues of utter darkness. He poured out his admiration in words which he wished to thunder and lighten; his irony stung like an adder, and his sarcasm cut like a two-edged sword. As he claims attention in writing as well as in painting, I shall quote a third passage, where his skill in the former art aided him in expressing his feelings concerning the latter.

"The inspiration of Michael Angelo was followed by the milder genius of Raphael-the father of dramatic painting-the painter of humanity: less elevated, less vigorous, but more insinuating; more pressing on our hearts; the warm master of our sympathies. What effect of human connexionwhat feature of the mind, from the gentlest emotion to the most fervid burst of passion, has been left unobserved; has not received a characteristic stamp from that examiner of men? Michael Angelo came to nature-nature came to Raphael-he transmitted her features like a lucid glass-unstained, unmodified. We stand with awe before Michael Angelo, and tremble at the height to which he elevates us. We embrace Raphael, and follow him wherever he leads us. Perfect human beauty he has not represented. No face of Raphael's is perfectly beautiful

-no figure of his, in the abstract, possesses the proportions which could raise it to a standard of imitation: form to him was only a vehicle of character or pathos; and to those he adapted it, in a mode and with a truth that leave all attempts at emendation hopeless. His invention connects the utmost stretch of possibility with the most plausible degree of probability, in a way that equally surprises our fancy, persuades our judgment, and affects our heart. His composition always hastens to the most necessary point as its centre, and from that disseminates to that leads back as rays all secondary ones. Group, form, and contrast are subordinate to the event, and commonplace is ever excluded. The line of Raphael has been excelled in correctness, elegance, and energy; his colour far surpassed in tone, in truth, and harmony; his masses, in roundness, and his chiaro-scuro in effect; but, considered as instruments of pathos, they have never been equalled; and in composition, invention, expression, and the power of telling a story, he has never been approached."

Such are the characters which Fuseli drew with his pen of those three illustrious artists. The calm dignity, the solemn grace, and tranquil divinity of Raphael affected him less than the vigorous, energetic, and startling productions of Michael Angelo. The works of the latter were indeed more akin to the fancy of Fuseli, which loved like a meteor to shine upon impassable places, and light the darkness of that region which forms the border-land between sense and absurdity. The mental radiance which Raphael shed so largely upon his compositions was inferior, in the opinion of this new student in the grand style, to the muscular glory of his great rival. Fuseli had little sympathy with gentleness and repose: he thought there was no dignity without action-no sublimity without exaggeration. He fulfilled the injunctions of Reynolds-he ate and

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