Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 40, February, 1861 | Page 7

had
become the demonstration. It was fine to come then, and be for a while
the guest of Titian.
There is evidence that he began after this visit to do what for years he
had been learning to do,--yet, of course, as is ever the case with the
earnest man, doing as a student, as one who feels all truth to be of the
infinite.
The result has been a series of remarkable pictures. There are among
these the specimens of portraiture, a few landscapes, and a number of
ideal, or, as they have been called, historical works. Of these last
named there is somewhat to be said; and those to which we shall refer
are selected for the purpose of illustrating principles, rather than for
that of description. These are all associated with history. There are
three representations of Venus, and several renderings of Scriptural
subjects.
If these pictures are valuable, they are so in virtue of elements which
can be appreciated. To present these elements to the world, to appeal to
those who can recognize them, is, it is fair to assume, the object of
exposition. Not merely praise, but the more wholesome meed of justice,
is the desire of a true artist; and as we deal with such a one, we do not
hesitate to speak of his works as they impress us.
First of all, in view of the artist's skill as a painter, it is well to regard
the external of his work. Here, in both Scriptural and mythological
subjects, there is little to condemn. The motives have been bravely and
successfully wrought out; the work is nobly, frankly done. The
superiority of methods which render the texture and quality of objects
becomes apparent. There is no attempt at illusion; yet the
representation of substances and spaces is faultless,--as, for instance,
the sky of the "Venus leading forth the Trojans." Nor have we seen that
chaste, pearly lustre of the most beautiful human skin so well rendered
as in the bosom of the figure which gleams against the blue.
But there is a pretension to more than technical excellence in the
mythological works; there is a declaration of physical beauty in the
very idea; in both these and the Scriptural there is an assumption of
historical value.

While we believe that the problem of physical beauty can be solved and
demonstrated, and the representations of Venus can be proved to
possess or to lack the beautiful, we choose to leave now, as we should
be compelled to do after discussion, the decision of the question to
those who raise it. It is of little avail to prove a work of art
beautiful,--of less, to prove it ugly. Spectators and generations cannot
be taken one by one and convinced. But where the operation of
judgment is from the reasoning rather than from the intuitive nature,
facts, opinions, and impressions may exert healthful influences.
The Venus of Page we cannot accept,--not because it may be
unbeautiful, for that might be but a shortcoming,--not because of any
technical failure, for, with the exception of weakness in the character of
waves, nothing can be finer,--not because it lacks elevated sentiment,
for this Venus was not the celestial,--but because it has nothing to do
with the present, neither is it of the past, nor related in any wise to any
imaginable future.
The present has no ideal of which the Venus of the ancients is a
manifestation. Other creations of that marvellous Greek mind might be
fitly used to symbolize phases of the present. Hercules might labor now;
there are other stables than the Augean; and not yet are all Hydras slain.
Armor is needed; and a Vulcan spirit is making the anvil ring beneath
the earth-crust of humanity. But Venus, the voluptuous, the
wanton,--no sensuousness pervading any religion of this era finds in
her its fitting type and sign. She, her companions, and her paramours,
with the magnificent religion which evolved them, were entombed
centuries ago; and no angel has rolled the stone from the door of their
sepulchre. They are dead; the necessity which called the Deistic ideal
into existence is dead; the ideal itself is dead, since Paul preached in
Athens its funeral sermon.
As history of past conditions, no value can be attached to
representations produced in subsequent ages. In this respect all these
pictures must be false. The best can only approximate truth. Yet his two
pictures of Scriptural subjects--one from the remoteness of Hebrew
antiquity, the other from the early days of Christianity--are most
valuable even as history: not the history of the flight from Egypt, nor
that of the flight into Egypt, but the history of what these mighty events
have become after the lapse of many centuries.

Herein lies the difference between Mythology and