Part 10
I do not wish to multiply examples, but this one thing I must further observe. There is one form of the horrible, the road to which lies almost exclusively through the disgusting, and that is the horror of famine. Even in ordinary life we can convey no idea of extreme hunger save by enumerating all the innutritious, unwholesome, and particularly disgusting things with which the stomach would fain appease its cravings. Since imitation can excite nothing of the feeling of actual hunger, it has recourse to another disagreeable sensation which, in cases of extreme hunger, is felt to be a lesser evil. We may thus infer how intense that other suffering must be which makes the present discomfort in comparison of small account.
Ovid says of the Oread whom Ceres sent to meet Famine,[165]—
Hanc (Famem) procul ut vidit.... ... refert mandata deæ; paulumque morata Quanquam aberat longe, quanquam modo venerat illuc, Visa tamen sensisse famem....
This is an unnatural exaggeration. The sight of a hungry person, even of Hunger herself, has no such power of contagion. Compassion and horror and loathing may be aroused, but not hunger. Ovid has not been sparing of this element of the horrible in the picture of Famine; while both he and Callimachus,[166] in their description of Erisichthon’s starvation, have laid chief emphasis upon the loathsome traits. After Erisichthon has devoured every thing, not sparing even the sacrificial cow, which his mother had been fattening for Vesta, Callimachus makes him fall on horses and cats, and beg in the streets for crumbs and filthy refuse from other men’s tables.
Καὶ τὰν βῶν ἔφαγεν, τὰν Ἑστίᾳ ἔτρεφε μάτηρ, Καὶ τὸν ἀεθλοφόρον καὶ τὸν πολεμήιον ἵππον, Καὶ τὰν αἴλουρον, τὰν ἔτρεμε θηρία μικκά— Καὶ τόχ’ ὁ τῶ βασιλῆος ἐνὶ τριόδοισι καθῆστο αἰτίζων ἀκόλως τε καὶ ἔκβολα λύματα δαιτός.
Ovid represents him finally as biting into his own flesh, that his body might thus furnish nourishment for itself.
Vis tamen illa mali postquam consumserat omnem Materiam ... Ipse suos artus lacero divellere morsu Cœpit· et infelix minuendo corpus alebat.
The hideous harpies were made loathsome and obscene in order that the hunger occasioned by their carrying off of the food might be the more horrible. Hear the complaints of Phineus in Apollonius:[167]—
τυτθὸν δ’ ἦν ἄρα δή ποτ’ ἐδητύος ἄμμι λίπωσι, πνεῖ τόδε μυδαλέον τε καὶ οὐ τλητὸν μένος ὀδμῆς. οὔ κέ τις οὐδὲ μίνυνθα βροτῶν ἄνσχοιτο πελάσσας, οὐδ’ εἰ οἱ ἀδάμαντος ἐληλαμένον κέαρ εἴη. ἀλλά με πικρὴ δῆτά κε καὶ ἄατος ἐπίσχει ἀνάγκη μίμνειν, καὶ μίμνοντα κακῇ ἐν γαστέρι θέσθαι.
I would gladly excuse in this way, if I could, Virgil’s disgusting introduction of the harpies. They, however, instead of occasioning an actual present hunger, only prophesy an inward craving; and this prophecy, moreover, is resolved finally into a mere play upon words.
Dante not only prepares us for the starvation of Ugolino by a most loathsome, horrible description of him together with his former persecutor in hell, but the slow starvation itself is not free from disgusting features, as where the sons offer themselves as food for the father. I give in a note a passage from a play by Beaumont and Fletcher, which might have served me in the stead of all other examples, were it not somewhat too highly drawn.[168]
I come now to objects of disgust in painting. Even could we prove that there are no objects directly disgusting to the eye, which painting as a fine art would naturally avoid, it would still be obliged to refrain from loathsome objects in general, because they become through the association of ideas disgusting also to the sense of sight. Pordenone, in a picture of the entombment, makes one of the by-standers hold his nose. Richardson[169] objects to this on the ground that Christ had not been long enough dead for corruption to set in. In the raising of Lazarus, however, he would allow the painter to represent some of the lookers-on in that attitude, because the narrative expressly states that the body was already offensive. But I consider the representation in both cases as insufferable, for not only the actual smell, but the very idea of it is nauseous. We shun bad-smelling places even when we have a cold in the head. But painting does not employ loathsomeness for its own sake, but, like poetry, to give emphasis to the ludicrous and the terrible. At its peril! What I have already said of ugliness in this connection applies with greater force to loathsomeness. This also loses much less of its effect in a visible representation than in a description addressed to the ear, and can therefore unite less closely with the elements of the ludicrous and terrible in painting than in poetry. As soon as the surprise passes and the first curious glance is satisfied, the elements separate and loathsomeness appears in all its crudity.
XXVI.
Winkelmann’s “History of Ancient Art” has appeared, and I cannot venture a step further until I have read it. Criticism based solely upon general principles may lead to conceits which sooner or later we find to our shame refuted in works on art.
The ancients well understood the connection between painting and poetry, and are sure not to have drawn the two arts more closely together than the good of both would warrant. What their artists have done will teach me what artists in general should do; and where such a man precedes with the torch of history, speculation may boldly follow.
We are apt to turn over the leaves of an important work before seriously setting ourselves to read it. My chief curiosity was to know the author’s opinion of the Laocoon; not of its merit as a work of art, for that he had already given, but merely of its antiquity. Would he agree with those who think that Virgil had the group before him, or with those who suppose the sculptors to have followed the poet?
I am pleased to find that he says nothing of imitation on either side. What need is there, indeed, of supposing imitation?
Very possibly the resemblances which I have been considering between the poetic picture and the marble group were not intentional but accidental, and, so far from one having served as a model for the other, the two may not even have had a common model. Had he, however, been misled by an appearance of imitation, he must have declared in favor of those who make Virgil the imitator. For he supposes the Laocoon to date from the period when Greek art was in its perfection: to be, therefore, of the time of Alexander the Great.
“Kind fortune,” he says,[170] “watching over the arts even in their extinction, has preserved for the admiration of the world a work of this period of art, which proves the truth of what history tells concerning the glory of the many lost masterpieces. The Laocoon with his two sons, the work of Agesander, Apollodorus,[171] and Athenodorus, of Rhodes, dates in all probability from this period, although we cannot determine the exact time, nor give, as some have done, the Olympiad in which these artists flourished.”
In a note he adds: “Pliny says not a word with regard to the time when Agesander and his assistants lived. But Maffei, in his explanation of the ancient statues, professes to know that these artists flourished in the eighty-eighth Olympiad; and others, like Richardson, have maintained the same on his authority. He must, I think, have mistaken an Athenodorus, a pupil of Polycletus, for one of our artists. Polycletus flourished in the eighty-seventh Olympiad, and his supposed pupil was therefore referred to the Olympiad following. Maffei can have no other grounds for his opinion.”
Certainly he can have no other. But why does Winkelmann content himself with the mere mention of this supposed argument of Maffei? Does it refute itself? Not altogether. For although not otherwise supported, it yet carries with it a certain degree of probability unless we can prove that Athenodorus, the pupil of Polycletus, and Athenodorus, the assistant of Agesander and Polydorus, could not possibly have been one and the same person. Happily this is proved by the fact that the two were natives of different countries. We have the express testimony of Pausanias[172] that the first Athenodorus was from Clitor in Arcadia, while the second, on the authority of Pliny, was born at Rhodes.
Winkelmann can have had no object in refraining from a direct refutation of Maffei by the statement of this circumstance. Probably the arguments which his undoubted critical knowledge derived from the skill of the workmanship seemed to him of such great weight, that he deemed any slight probability which Maffei’s opinion might have on its side a matter of no importance. He doubtless recognized in the Laocoon too many of those _argutiæ_[173] (traits of animation) peculiar to Lysippus, to suppose it to be of earlier date than that master who was the first to enrich art with this semblance of life.
But, granting the fact to be proved that the Laocoon cannot be older than Lysippus, have we thereby proved that it must be contemporaneous with him or nearly so? May it not be a work of much later date? Passing in review those periods previous to the rise of the Roman monarchy, when art in Greece alternately rose and sank, why, I ask, might not Laocoon have been the happy fruit of that emulation which the extravagant luxury of the first emperors must have kindled among artists? Why might not Agesander and his assistants have been the contemporaries of Strongylion, Arcesilaus, Pasiteles, Posidonius, or Diogenes? Were not some of the works of those masters counted among the greatest treasures ever produced by art? And if undoubted works from the hand of these men were still in existence, but the time in which they lived was unknown and left to be determined by the style of their art, would not some inspiration from heaven be needed to prevent the critic from referring them to that period which to Winkelmann seemed the only one worthy of producing the Laocoon?
Pliny, it is true, does not expressly mention the time when the sculptors of the Laocoon lived. But were I to conclude from a study of the whole passage whether he would have them reckoned among the old or the new artists, I confess the probability seems to me in favor of the latter inference. Let the reader judge.
After speaking at some length of the oldest and greatest masters of sculpture,—Phidias, Praxiteles, and Scopas,—and then giving, without chronological order, the names of the rest, especially of those who were represented in Rome by any of their works, Pliny proceeds as follows:[174]—
Nec multo plurium fama est, quorundam claritati in operibus eximiis obstante numero artificum, quoniam nec unus occupat gloriam, nec plures pariter nuncupari possunt, sicut in Laocoonte, qui est in Titi Imperatoris domo, opus omnibus et picturæ et statuariæ artis præponendum. Ex uno lapide eum et liberos draconumque mirabiles nexus de consilii sententia fecere summi artifices, Agesander et Polydorus et Athenodorus Rhodii. Similiter Palatinas domus Cæsarum replevere probatissimis signis Craterus cum Pythodoro, Polydectes cum Hermolao, Pythodorus alius cum Artemone, et singularis Aphrodisius Trallianus. Agrippæ Pantheum decoravit Diogenes Atheniensis; et Caryatides in columnis templi ejus probantur inter pauca operum: sicut in fastigio posita signa, sed propter altitudinem loci minus celebrata.
Of all the artists mentioned in this passage, Diogenes of Athens is the one whose date is fixed with the greatest precision. He adorned the Pantheon of Agrippa, and therefore lived under Augustus. But a close examination of Pliny’s words will, I think, determine with equal certainty the date of Craterus and Pythodorus, Polydectes and Hermolaus, the second Pythodorus and Artemon, as also of Aphrodisius of Tralles. He says of them: “Palatinas domus Cæsarum replevere probatissimis signis.” Can this mean only that the palaces were filled with admirable works by these artists, which the emperors had collected from various places and brought to their dwellings in Rome? Surely not. The sculptors must have executed their works expressly for the imperial palaces, and must, therefore, have lived at the time of these emperors. That they were artists of comparatively late date, who worked only in Italy, is plain from our finding no mention of them elsewhere. Had they worked in Greece at an earlier day, Pausanias would have seen some work of theirs and recorded it. He mentions, indeed, a Pythodorus,[175] but Hardouin is wrong in supposing him to be the same referred to by Pliny. For Pausanias calls the statue of Juno at Coronæa, in Bœotia, the work of the former, ἄγαλμα ἀρχαῖον (an ancient idol), a term which he applies only to the works of those artists who lived in the first rude days of art, long before Phidias and Praxiteles. With such works the emperors would certainly not have adorned their palaces. Of still less value is another suggestion of Hardouin, that Artemon may be the painter of the same name elsewhere mentioned by Pliny. Identity of name is a slight argument, and by no means authorizes us to do violence to the natural interpretation of an uncorrupted passage.
If it be proved beyond a doubt that Craterus and Pythodorus, Polydectes and Hermolaus, with the rest, lived at the time of the emperors whose palaces they adorned with their admirable works, then I think we can assign no other date to those artists, the sculptors of the Laocoon, whose names Pliny connects with these by the word _similiter_. For if Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus were really such old masters as Winkelmann supposes, it would be the height of impropriety for an author, who makes great account of precision of expression, to leap from them to the most modern artists, merely with the words “in like manner.”
But it may be urged that this _similiter_ has no reference to a common date, but to some other circumstance common to all these masters, who yet in age were widely different. Pliny, it may be said, is speaking of artists who had worked in partnership, and on this account had not obtained the fame they merited. The names of all had been left in neglect, because no one artist could appropriate the honor of the common work, and to mention the names of all the participators would require too much time (quoniam nec unus occupat gloriam, nec plures pariter nuncupari possunt). This had been the fate of the sculptors of the Laocoon, as well as of the many other masters whom the emperors had employed in the decoration of their palaces.
But, granting all this, the probabilities are still in favor of the supposition that Pliny meant to refer only to the later artists whose labors had been in common. If he had meant to include older ones, why confine himself to the sculptors of the Laocoon?
Why not mention others, as Onatas and Calliteles, Timocles and Timarchides, or the sons of this Timarchides, who together had made a statue of Jupiter at Rome?[176] Winkelmann himself says that a long list might be made of older works which had more than one father.[177] And would Pliny have thought but of the single example of Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, if he had not meant to confine himself strictly to the more modern masters?
If ever a conjecture gained in probability from the number and magnitude of the difficulties solved by it, this one, that the sculptors of the Laocoon flourished under the first emperors, has that advantage in a high degree. For had they lived and worked in Greece at the time which Winkelmann assigns to them, had the Laocoon itself existed earlier in Greece, then the utter silence of the Greeks with regard to such a work, “surpassing all the results of painting or statuary” (opere omnibus et picturæ et statuariæ artis præponendo), is most surprising. It is hard to believe that such great masters should have created nothing else, or that the rest of their works should have been, equally with the Laocoon, unknown to Pausanias. In Rome, on the contrary, the greatest masterpiece might have remained long concealed. If the Laocoon had been finished as early as the time of Augustus, there would be nothing surprising in Pliny’s being the first, and, indeed, the last, to mention it. For remember what he tells[178] of a Venus by Scopas, which stood in the temple of Mars at Rome:
... “quemcunque alium locum nobilitatura. Romæ quidem magnitudo operum eam obliterat, ac magni officiorum negotiorumque acervi omnes a contemplatione talium abducunt: quoniam otiosorum et in magno loci silentio apta admiratio talis est.”
Those who would fain see in the group an imitation of Virgil’s Laocoon will readily catch at what I have been saying, nor will they be displeased at another conjecture which just occurs to me. Why should not Asinius Pollio, they may think, have been the patron who had Virgil’s Laocoon put into marble by Greek artists? Pollio was a particular friend of the poet, survived him, and appears to have written an original work on the Æneid. For whence but from such a work could the various comments have been drawn which Servius quotes from that author?[179] Pollio was, moreover, a lover of art and a connoisseur, possessed a valuable collection of the best of the old masterpieces, ordered new works from the artists of his day, and showed in his choice a taste quite likely to be pleased by so daring a piece as the Laocoon,[180] “ut fuit acris vehementiæ, sic quoque spectari monumenta sua voluit.”
Since, however, the cabinet of Pollio in Pliny’s day, when the Laocoon was standing in the palace of Titus, seems to have existed entire in a separate building, this supposition again loses something of its probability. Why might not Titus himself have done what we are trying to ascribe to Pollio?
XXVII.
A little item first brought to my notice by Winkelmann himself confirms me in my opinion that the sculptors of the Laocoon lived at the time of the emperors, or at least could not date from so early a period as he assigns them. It is this:[181] “In Nettuno, the ancient Antium, Cardinal Alexander Albani discovered in 1717 in a deep vault, which lay buried under the sea, a vase of the grayish black marble now called _bigio_, wherein the Laocoon was inlaid. Upon this vase is the following inscription:—
ΑΘΑΝΟΔΩΡΟΣ ΑΓΗΣΑΝΔΡΟΥ ΡΟΔΙΟΣ ΕΠΟΙΗΣΕ.
“Athanodorus of Rhodes, son of Agesander, made it.” We learn from this inscription that father and son worked on the Laocoon; and probably Apollodorus (Polydorus) was also a son of Agesander, for this Athanodorus can be no other than the one mentioned by Pliny. The inscription also proves that more than three works of art have been found—the number stated by Pliny—on which the artists have set the word “made,” in definite past time, ἐποίησε, _fecit_. Other artists, he says, from modesty, made use of indefinite time, “was making,” ἐποίει, _faciebat_.
Few will contradict Winkelmann in his conclusion that the Athanodorus of this inscription can be no other than the Athenodorus whom Pliny mentions as among the sculptors of the Laocoon. Athanodorus and Athenodorus are entirely synonymous; for the Rhodians used the Doric dialect. But the other conclusions which he draws from the inscription require further comment.
The first, that Athenodorus was a son of Agesander, may pass. It is highly probable, though by no means certain. Some of the old artists, we know, called themselves after their teachers instead of taking their fathers’ names. What Pliny says of the brothers Apollonius and Tauriscus cannot well be explained in any other way.[182]
But shall we say that this inscription contradicts the statement of Pliny that there were only three works of art to which their masters had set their names in definite past time (ἐποίησε instead of ἐποίει)? This inscription! What need of this to teach us what we might have learned long ago from a multitude of others? On the statue of Germanicus was there not the inscription Κλεομένης—ἐποίησε, Cleomenes made? on the so-called Apotheosis of Homer, Ἀρχέλαος ἐποίησε, Archelaus made? on the well-known vase at Gaeta, Σαλπίων ἐποίησε, Salpion made? nor are other instances wanting.[183]
Winkelmann may answer: “No one knows that better than I. So much the worse for Pliny. His statement has been so much the oftener contradicted, and is so much the more surely refuted.”
By no means. How if Winkelmann has made Pliny say more than he meant to say? How if these examples contradict, not Pliny’s statement, but only something which Winkelmann supposes him to have stated? And this is actually the case. I must quote the whole passage. Pliny, in the dedication of his work to Titus, speaks with the modesty of a man who knows better than any one else how far what he has accomplished falls short of perfection. He finds a noteworthy example of such modesty among the Greeks, on the ambitious and boastful titles of whose books (inscriptiones, propter quas vadimonium deseri possit) he dwells at some length, and then says:[184]
Et ne in totum videar Græcos insectari, ex illis nos velim intelligi pingendi fingendique conditoribus, quos in libellis his invenies, absoluta opera, et illa quoque quæ mirando non satiamur, pendenti titulo inscripsisse: ut APELLES FACIEBAT, aut POLYCLETUS: tanquam inchoata semper arte et imperfecta: ut contra judiciorum varietates superesset artifici regressus ad veniam, velut emendaturo quidquid desideraretur, si non esset interceptus. Quare plenum verecundiæ illud est, quod omnia opera tanquam novissima inscripsere, et tanquam singulis fato adempti. Tria non amplius, ut opinor, absolute traduntur inscripta, ILLE FECIT, quæ suis locis reddam: quo apparuit, summam artis securitatem auctori placuisse, et ob id magna invidia fuere omnia ea.
I desire to call particular attention to the words of Pliny, “pingendi fingendique conditoribus” (the creators of the imitative arts). Pliny does not say that it was the habit of all artists of every date to affix their names to their works in indefinite past time. He says explicitly that only the first of the old masters—those creators of the imitative arts, Apelles, Polycletus, and their contemporaries—possessed this wise modesty, and, by his mention of these alone, he gives plainly to be understood, though he does not actually say it in words, that their successors, particularly those of a late date, expressed themselves with greater assurance.
With this interpretation, which is the only true one, we may fully accept the inscription from the hand of one of the three sculptors of the Laocoon without impugning the truth of what Pliny says, that but three works existed whereon their creators had cut the inscription in the finished past time; only three, that is, among all the older works, of the time of Apelles, Polycletus, Nicias, and Lysippus. But then we cannot accept the conclusion that Athenodorus and his assistants were contemporaries of Apelles and Lysippus, as Winkelmann would make them. We should reason thus. If it be true that among the works of the old masters, Apelles, Polycletus, and others of that class, there were but three whose inscriptions stood in definite past time, and if it be further true that Pliny has mentioned these three by name,[185] then Athenodorus, who had made neither of these three works, and who nevertheless employs the definite past time in his inscriptions, cannot belong among those old masters; he cannot be a contemporary of Apelles and Lysippus, but must have a later date assigned him.