Walter Pater: an Imaginative Sense of Fact

A Collection of Essays

Philip Dodd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135780234
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

First Published in 1981. Pater is certainly the least widely read and understood of any of the Victorian critics and creative writers, though there are signs of a coming revival of interest in him. Each of the discussions included in this issue devoted to Pater touches, in some significant way, on his "imaginative sense of fact, " on his struggle with the objective 'givens' of experience (ideas or individuals), and on his efforts to co-opt or turn that Other into a reordered reflection of his own image.

Pater and Ruskin on Michelangelo: Two Contrasting Views

In 1871 Ruskin delivered one of the most notorious lectures of his career. It was entitled “The Relation Between Michael Angelo and Tintoret” and in it Ruskin described Michelangelo as “the chief captain in evil” of the Italian Renaissance.¹ He was, said Ruskin, “proud, yet not proud enough to be at peace; melancholy, yet not deeply enough to be raised above petty pain.”² Ruskin gave this lecture in the University Museum Galleries, Oxford, on 13 June, 1871, and only five months later another account of the artist appeared from the pen of an Oxford critic. In November 1871 Pater published “The Poetry of Michelangelo” in the Fortnightly Review³ but it was quite unlike Ruskin’s denunciation of the evil genius of the Renaissance. Pater’s stress on Michelangelo’s sensitivity and inner psychological struggle elicited the comment from John Addington Symonds that Pater had a “delicate sympathy” with Michelangelo’s mind.⁴ Inevitably, one wonders whether Pater who was in Oxford in June 1871⁵ heard Ruskin’s lecture at a time when he was certainly composing his own ideas on the subject. We know that Ruskin’s views created a disturbance. Edward Poynter, the Slade Professor at London University said that he burned “with indignation” when he heard about them;⁶ Sir William Richmond, Ruskin’s successor in the Oxford chair, tried to undo the harm he felt that Ruskin had done by delivering a eulogy on Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel,⁷ and rather more impulsively Edward Burne Jones, when he was told how Ruskin had treated one of his artistic heroes, said that he thought of taking to drink or drowning himself in the Surrey Canal.⁸ There is, however, no direct evidence that Pater was aware of Ruskin’s performance. He makes no mention of Ruskin’s name in his essay and there is no quotation from Ruskin’s lecture. Yet when one looks more closely at the two pieces there are a number of thematic similarities between them, and there is something in Pater’s rather oblique approach to Michelangelo which suggests that he might have had Ruskin in mind. For example, both critics make substantial use of the collection of Michelangelo drawings in the possession of the University. Ruskin claimed that it was his duty to warn students that “these designs have nothing whatever to do with present life, with its passions, or with its religion.”⁹ On the contrary, says Pater, one of the reasons for studying Michelangelo is that he helps us to unravel “the mixed, confused productions of the modern mind.”¹⁰ It is through the clearer outlines of Michelangelo, says Pater, that we can understand the more complex work of William Blake or Victor Hugo. Again Ruskin makes a great deal of what he calls Michelangelo’s “bad workmanship”¹¹—the lack of finish and the incompleteness of some of the sculpture. Pater, however, draws attention to this incompleteness as one of Michelangelo’s most beguiling characteristics. On one occasion he says that the lack of finish is Michelangelo’s equivalent for colour; on another he says that it is Michelangelo’s way of identifying the sculptured figure with the living rock from which it is hewn. In these studies of Michelangelo there are four important questions raised by both Ruskin and Pater on which they differ significantly. They both discuss the status of the show of strength and power in Michelangelo’s art; they both speak of the part Michelangelo was supposed to have played first in the Renaissance then in the Counter Reformation; both of them test his treatment of the nude against the standards of classical Greece; and both of them invoke the temperament of Michelangelo to support their critical theories. On these issues Pater makes no attempt to refute Ruskin directly. He treads warily around the questions of morality for example. Instead, Pater presents his readers with a different view of Michelangelo. Where Ruskin describes him as bombastic, mannered and overblown, Pater depicts him as a character of gentle melancholy disposition and above all “sweet.” It may seem curious that two such different portraits of Michelangelo could be drawn within six months of each other, yet the whole history of Michelangelo criticism is one of disagreement. Though both these portraits now seem to us slightly eccentric neither of them is entirely fictional. They both have their basis in fact; both of them rely upon a number of received ideas and both of them represent the extension of a long standing debate about the nature of Michelangelo and his work.

Michelangelo had never been the subject of neglect. Unlike the work of Botticelli or that of Piero della Francesca no one could overlook the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel or ignore the sculpture in the Medici Chapel in Florence. All visitors to Rome were forced to pass some judgement on St Peter’s. Familiarity with Michelangelo’s work, however, did not promote agreement, and from the time that Vasari published his eloquent praise of Michelangelo in The Lives of…the Painters in 1568 voices of dissent had been raised. According to Vasari the history of art before Michelangelo was a prelude to his magnificence; Michelangelo, he said, was a divine gift to the aesthetically benighted human race; he was the saviour of the arts and the prince of artists. Understandably there was a reaction to this extreme point of view, and it was one which grew strongly in the seventeenth century. Malvasia and Bellori both wrote histories of painting which contained the sharp reminder that both Bologna and Rome had produced artists of outstanding merit;¹² the Venetian writers Scanelli and Lomazzo pointed out that Titian far excelled Michelangelo in the art of oil painting,¹³ and the artist Salvator Rosa wrote a rhyming essay which satirised Michelangelo in favour of Neapolitan painting.¹⁴ The seventeenth-century writers Roland Fréart and John Evelyn attacked Michelangelo in two ways. They objected to his scriptural heterodoxy (Christ and Charon in the same picture) and to what they felt to be his licentiousness.¹⁵ Strange though it now seems, there was a period in the early eighteenth century when the moral condemnation of Michelangelo was very strong. In 1722, for example, Jonathan Richardson retrospectively congratulated the “breeches-maker” Daniele da Volterra, on covering up what Richardson called the “choquing Improprieties” of the Sistine Chapel.¹⁶

The later eighteenth century saw what might be called a conflict over the beautiful and the sublime in Michelangelo’s art. Led by Winckelmann, a group of writers decided that when measured against the standards of human beauty established in ancient Greece, Michelangelo’s work was turbulent and mannered. Michelangelo lacked “decorum” and “grace,” and his love of theatrical gesture anticipated the wild, violent postures of Baroque art which Winckelmann so hated. “The very course which led Michelangelo to impassible places and steep cliffs,” wrote Winckelmann, “plunged Bernini…into bogs and pools; for he sought to dignify as it were by exaggeration.”¹⁷ In England, however, Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime came to Michelangelo’s aid. Burke does not actually mention Michelangelo, but even before Joshua Reynolds’ eloquent defence of his hero in the famous Discourses the appreciation of Michelangelo’s art had become closely connected with feelings of magnificence and of terror.¹⁸ Reynolds himself had little use for continental theories like those of Winkelmann and was happy to breathe Michelangelo’s name as the last word in his last lecture as President of the Royal Academy.¹⁹ With various reservations and modifications, the tradition that Michelangelo’s work represented a sublime moment in the history of art was perpetuated in this country by the lectures of the academicians John Opie and Henry Fuseli. In his fifth lecture at the Royal Academy, Fuseli, subtly changing a metaphor from Winkelmann, said, “The breadth of Michelangelo resembles the tide and ebb of a mighty sea: waves approach, arrive, retreat, but in their rise and fall…impress us only with the image of the power that raises, that directs them.”²⁰ In a lecture of 1784 James Barry introduced the adjective “Michelangelesque,”²¹ meaning “sublime,” into the language, and ten years later the same tradition was set to not very accomplished verse by John Courtney who asked: “But who with Angelo can vie?”

He rears his wondrous dome on high

Pois’d in the ethereal clime

His daring pencil boasts the art

To awe the eye, to rule the heart

And paint the true sublime.²²

In the nineteenth century a new challenge to the supremacy of Michelangelo in England came from the devotees of early Italian art. The primitives were valued for their simplicity, their restraint and their understatement. What then of Michelangelo? What place could be found for him in the new interpretation of the history of art which put so much emphasis on the sentiment, piety and morality of medievalism? Ruskin and Pater gave different answers to this problem. For Ruskin, Michelangelo was wholly unworthy because he provided aesthetic expression for a decadent culture—in his words for the “partly scientific and completely lascivious enthusiasms of literature and painting, renewed under classical influence.”²³ Pater, however, stressed Michelangelo’s links with the earlier phases of art which had become so popular in the early nineteenth century; Michelangelo, he said, was the final flowering of the medieval spirit. “He sums up,” said Pater, “the whole character of medieval art… in that which distinguishes it most clearly from classical work.”²⁴

So each century after Michelangelo’s death had contributed some new element to the debate about the value of his work. One question, however, dominated all others—what do we make of the extravagant show of power and strength in the work? Pater was aware of this difficulty and confronted it in the first sentence of his essay. “Critics of Michelangelo,” he said, “have sometimes spoken as if the only characteristic of his genius were a wonderful strength, verging…on what is singular or strange.”²⁵ This was quite true. Writers from Richardson at the beginning of the eighteenth century to Fuseli at the end were obsessed by the magnificence and power of Michelangelo to the exclusion of other subtler qualities. “There is not a more remarkable example of…the force of the sublime than that of Michelangelo”²⁶ said Richardson, and according to Fuseli, Michelangelo made “beauty of form” subservient to “grandeur.”²⁷ Comparing Michelangelo with Raphael, Reynolds said that Michelangelo “has more of the Poetical Inspiration; his ideas are vast and sublime,”²⁸ and in William Brown’s 1770 translation of Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogue on Painting the strength of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: On Reading Pater
• The Intellectual Context of Walter Pater’s “Conclusion”
• Pater’s Criticism: Some Distinctions
• Judas and the Widow Thomas Wright and A.C.Benson as Biographers of Walter Pater: The Widow*
• Pater and Ruskin on Michelangelo: Two Contrasting Views
• A New Edition of Walter Pater’s Collected Works: A Forum