Loves Meinie | Page 5

have plucked the wings from birds, to
make angels of men, and the claws from birds, to make devils of men.
If you were to take away from religious art these two great helps of
its--I must say, on the whole, very feeble--imagination; if you were to
take from it, I say, the power of putting wings on shoulders, and claws
on fingers and toes, how wonderfully the sphere of its angelic and
diabolic characters would be contracted! Reduced only to the sources
of expression in face or movements, you might still find in good early
sculpture very sufficient devils; but the best angels would resolve
themselves, I think, into little more than, and not often into so much as,
the likenesses of pretty women, with that grave and (I do not say it
ironically) majestic expression which they put on, when, being very
fond of their husbands and children, they seriously think either the one
or the other have misbehaved themselves.
12. And it is not a little discouraging for me, and may well make you
doubtful of my right judgment in this endeavor to lead you into closer
attention to the bird, with its wings and claws still in its own
possession;--it is discouraging, I say, to observe that the beginning of
such more faithful and accurate observation in former art, is exactly
coeval with the commencement of its decline. The feverish and
ungraceful natural history of Paul, called, "of the birds," Paolo degli
Uccelli, produced, indeed, no harmful result on the minds of his
contemporaries, they watched in him, with only contemptuous
admiration, the fantasy of zoological instinct which filled his house
with painted dogs, cats, and birds, because he was too poor to fill it
with real ones. Their judgment of this morbidly naturalistic art was

conclusively expressed by the sentence of Donatello, when going one
morning into the Old Market, to buy fruit, and finding the animal
painter uncovering a picture, which had cost him months of care,
(curiously symbolic in its subject, the infidelity of St. Thomas, of the
investigatory fingering of the natural historian,) "Paul, my friend," said
Donatello, "thou art uncovering the picture just when thou shouldst be
shutting it up."
13. No harm, therefore, I repeat, but, on the contrary, some wholesome
stimulus to the fancy of men like Luca and Donatello themselves, came
of the grotesque and impertinent zoology of Uccello.
But the fatalest institutor of proud modern anatomical and scientific art,
and of all that has polluted the dignity, and darkened the charity, of the
greater ages, was Antonio Pollajuolo of Florence. Antonio (that is to
say) the Poulterer--so named from the trade of his grandfather, and with
just so much of his grandfather's trade left in his own disposition, that
being set by Lorenzo Ghiberti to complete one of the ornamental
festoons of the gates of the Florentine Baptistery, there, (says Vasari)
"Antonio produced a quail, which may still be seen, and is so beautiful,
nay, so perfect, that it wants nothing but the power of flight."
14. Here, the morbid tendency was as attractive as it was subtle.
Ghiberti himself fell under the influence of it; allowed the borders of
his gates, with their fluttering birds and bossy fruits, to dispute the
spectators' favor with the religious subjects they inclosed; and, from
that day forward, minuteness and muscularity were, with curious
harmony of evil, delighted in together; and the lancet and the
microscope, in the hands of fools, were supposed to be complete
substitutes for imagination in the souls of wise men: so that even the
best artists are gradually compelled, or beguiled, into compliance with
the curiosity of their day; and Francia, in the city of Bologna, is held to
be a "kind of god, more particularly" (again I quote Vasari) "after he
had painted a set of caparisons for the Duke of Urbino, on which he
depicted a great forest all on fire, and whence there rushes forth an
immense number of every kind of animal, with several human figures.
This terrific, yet truly beautiful representation, was all the more highly

esteemed for the time that had been expended on it in the plumage of
the birds, and other minutiæ in the delineation of the different animals,
and in the diversity of the branches and leaves of the various trees seen
therein;" and thenceforward the catastrophe is direct, to the
ornithological museums which Breughel painted for gardens of Eden,
and to the still life and dead game of Dutch celebrities.
15. And yet I am going to invite you to-day to examine, down to almost
microscopic detail, the aspect of a small bird, and to invite you to do
this, as a most expedient and sure step in your study of the greatest art.
But the difference