nay, a sketch, a scrabble of the hand of a great master, will be capable of administering to him a greater degree of pleasure than those who know it not by experience can have any conception of. Besides the graceful and noble attitudes, the beauty of colors and forms, and the fine effects of light and shadow, which none sees as a connoisseur does, such a one enters farther than any other can do into the beauties of the invention, expression, and other parts of the work he is considering. He sees strokes of art, contrivances, expedients, a delicacy and spirit, that others see not, or very imperfectly. He sees what force of mind the great masters had to conceive ideas; what judgment to see things beautifully, or to imagine beauty from what they saw; and what a power their hands were endued withal, in a few strokes and with ease, to show to another what themselves conceived. What is it that gives us pleasure in reading a history or poem, but that the mind is thereby furnished with a variety of images? And what distinguishes some authors, and sets them above the common level, but their knowing how to raise their subject? The Trojan or Peleponnesian wars would never have been thought of by us, if a Homer or Thucydides had not told the stories of them, who knew how to do it so as to fill the minds of their readers with great and delightful ideas. He who converses with the works of the best masters is always reading such admirable authors; and his mind consequently, in proportion, entertained and delighted with the histories, fables, characters, the ideas of magnificent buildings, fine prospects, &c. And he sees these things in those different lights which the various manners of thinking of the several masters sets them; he sees them as they are represented by the capricious but vast genius of Leonardo da Vinci; the fierce and gigantic one of Michael Angelo; the divine and polite one of Raphael; the poetical fancy of Guido; the angelical mind of Corregio, or Parmegiano; the haughty, sullen, but accomplished Annibal, the learned Augustino Caracci. A connoisseur hath this further advantage, that he not only sees beauties in pictures and paintings, which to common eyes are invisible; but he learns by these to see such in nature, in the exquisite forms and colors, the fine effects of lights, and shadows, and reflections, which in her are always to be found, and from whence he hath a pleasure which otherwise he could never have had, and which none with untaught eyes can possibly discern: he has a constant pleasure of this kind even in the most common things, and the most familiar to us, so that what people usually look upon with the utmost indifference, creates an home-felt delight in his mind. The noblest works of Raphael, the most ravishing music of Handel, the most masterly strokes of Milton, touch not people who are without discernment. So, the beauties themselves of those all-perfect works of the great author of nature are not seen but by enlightened eyes, that is, those eyes which are taught to see; to those they appear far otherwise than before they were; so, so far otherwise that one sees through a glass darkly (through the gross medium of ignorance); the other, that of a connoisseur, as when the angel had removed the film from Adam's eyes, and purged with euphrasy and rue, the visual nerve, seeth beauty divine and human, as far as human may, as we hope to see everything, still nearer to its true beauty and perfection, in a better state; when we shall see what eye hath not seen, neither hath it entered the heart of man to conceive." 66 By conversing with the works of the best masters, our imaginations are impregnated with great and beautiful images, which present themselves on all occasions in reading an author, or ruminating upon some great action, ancient or modern; everything is raised, everything improved from what it would have been otherwise. Nay, those lovely images with which our minds are thus enriched, arise there continually, and give us pleasure, with or without any particular application. What is rare and curious, exclusive of any other consideration, we naturally take pleasure in; because, as variable as our circumstances are, there is so much of repetition in life that more variety is still desirable. The works of the great masters would thus recommend themselves to us, though they had not that transcendent excellency that they have; they are such as are rarely seen; they are the works of a small number of the species in one little country of the world, and in a short space of time. But their excellency being put into the scale makes the rarity of them justly considerable. They are the works of men like whom none are now to be found, and when there will be, God only knows! "Art et guides, tout est dans les Champs Elysées." LA FONTAINE. What the old man Melanthius says of Polygnotus (as he is cited by Plutarch in the life of Cimon), may, with a little alteration, be applied to these men in general; it is thus already translated: "This famous painter, at his own expense, And so he did oblige both gods and men." What still adds to the rarity of the excellent works we are speaking of is, their number must necessarily diminish by sudden accidents, or the slow, but certain injuries of time. Another pleasure belonging to connoissance is when we find anything particular and curious; as the first thoughts of a master for some remarkable picture; the original of a work of a great master, the copy of which we have already by some other considerable hand; a drawing of a picture, or after an antique very famous, or which is now lost; or when we make some new acquisition upon reasonable terms, chiefly when we get for ourselves something we much desired, but could not hope to be masters of; when we make some new discovery, something that improves our knowledge in connoissance or painting, or otherwise; and abundance of such like incidents, and which very frequently happens to a diligent connoisseur. The pleasure that arises from a knowledge of hands is not like, or equal to that of the other parts of the business of a connoisseur, but neither is this destitute of it. When one sees an admirable piece of art, it is part of the connoisseur to know to whom to attribute it, and then to know his history; which arises, I hope, from a natural justice in the human mind that loves and desires to pay a little tribute of gratitude where it discovers it to be due to that merit of another which it is actually enjoying. The custom of putting the author's portrait or life at the beginning of his book, is kindly giving us an opportunity of doing this. When one is considering a picture or a drawing,* and at the same time thinks this was done by him who had many * The passage here commencing is one enormously long sentence, continued to the words "these reflections," at p. 140. It may be supposed, however, to be very agreeably poured forth in the heat of conversation. extraordinary endowments of body and mind, and was withal a virtuous man and a fine gentleman in his whole life, and still more at his death, expiring in the arms of one of the greatest princes of that age, Francis I., king of France, who loved him as a friend ;*—another is of him who lived a long and happy life beloved of the Emperor Charles V., and many others of the first princes of Europe ;t-when one has another in his hand, and thinks that this was done by one who so excelled in three arts, as that any one of them, in that degree he possessed them all, had rendered him worthy of immortality, and who moreover dared to contend with his sovereign (one of the haughtiest popes that ever was) upon a slight offered to him, and extricated himself with honor;‡ -another is the work of that great self-formed, authentic genius, who was the model of supernatural grace; who alone painted heaven, as surely it is; and hath represented to human weakness the angelic nature; this, too, by inspiration! not having had any master, or none but whom he left quite out of sight in the earliest progresses of his divine pencil; he even never saw the works of other great masters, having always confined himself to his native Lombardy, except one single one of Raphael, and a great one indeed that was, his St. Cecilia when brought to Bologna; and then, after considering it with long attention, and the admiration it deserved, he had the spirit (and he had a right to that spirit) to say, "Well, I am a painter, too;" he was so little known to the rest of Italy, that he passed till very lately, in the opinion of the world, for a low, poor, indigent creature, from the ill-information or malice of Vasari, always prejudiced against the Lombard painters, when his character was rescued from its affected obscurity, and his noble birth and connections, and splen *Leonardo da Vinci. † Titian. » Corregio. |