Kommentar til Marts 1827

[Author’s note in the text:]
Much may be said on both sides. Years, in sculpture, as well as painting, do much for the artist: time glazes better than the best pencil. The ancients (unless we are to rely on some dubious expressions of Pliny) do not seem to have much insisted on these tricks of the art; though amongst men and schools who could add painting and gilding to sculpture, thus degrading statuary to a wax-work, affectations of a still less barbarous character might reasonably be expected. The yellow patina, so much affected by Canova and his school, is a mere mechanical process, and not of the most cleanly, and may to a certain degree be admitted, when the mellow quality of the marble itself does not supersede its necessity. But this is to be distinguished from what must precede it – the manner of handling. Few artists spent more time upon the definitive, and completing master-touches than Canova, or intrusted less this stage of his productions to minor or meaner hands. He imagined that a sort of empâtement, or fleshiness, which was the object of his idolatry in painting, could be extended with advantage to sculpture. Hence all is flowing, round, and I might almost say blurred and muddy; all that is masculine, sharp, and clear, is wasted and rubbed away. He carried this virtue or vice so far as to finish frequently by night, in order that by working when the shades were most firm, he might more fully attain, when exposed to daylight that, peculiar suavity, Corregesque and Catullan at the same time, which distinguishes his productions, both in conception and execution, from most of the moderns. I know not, however, whether he has not altogether lost by the experiment. It is remarkable that when viewed by torchlight beside the productions of the ancients, his works lose almost all their character, and sink into feeble copies. I found this very singularly the case in the comparison between the Athletes of antiquity and his Pugilists. His anatomy, indeed, was never much admired. I heard a French artist describe his Hercules as a “matelass, piqué.” The ancients were distinguished by very opposite manner of treating the naked; and though Quatremère’s theory seems to imply that the operation was merely mechanical, it is impossible not to admire, even in the simplest of their works, the greatest science and precision in the details. Every one eulogizes the Belvidere Torso; but the Apollino, which is the very smoothness of a youthful and celestial nature, is not less remarkable for the minuteness and knowledge of all its parts. David was in the habit of selecting it as an example, and often exhibited, by means of torchlight from below, as an interminable complication of line and muscle expressed with the nicest art, what appeared during the day was to his pupils an almost uniform surface. Nor was their judgment less conspicuous in the apparent rudeness with which some of their monuments have been executed—the Muses, the Panathenaic procession, and other reliefs of a similar description, for instance. As they have never been excelled, perhaps, in the skiagraphy of their architecture, so also nothing could be more nicely calculated for the point of view, or in truer optical relation with the object or purpose for which they were intended, than every class of their public and private sculpture. I am not aware that it is on such principles that Thorwaltzen justifies the coarseness which characterizes the majority of his works; but I am quite sure that it proceeds from any other cause than incapacity. Witness his Venus, which may stand in point of execution beside any statue of Canova. I attribute it rather to the mental organization of the man, and the habits which he has subsequently contracted. He dislikes it; and dislike generates neglect, and neglect contempt.

Sidst opdateret 25.10.2020