THE HUMANISTIC THEORY OF PAINTING - College Art Association

UT PICTURA POESIS: HUMANISTIC THEORY OF PAINTING 217
art. Of these Reynolds was fully aware when he wrote his opinion of the Marie de' Medici
series; for although he agreed with Du Bos that Rubens was at fault in mixing allegori-
cal figures with real personages, he also insisted that in sacrificing truth to nature, Rubens
gained another kind of truth that was more significant. "If," says Reynolds, "the artist
considered himself as engaged to furnish this gallery with a rich, various and splendid
ornament, this could not be done, at least in an equal degree, without peopling the air
and water with these allegorical figures; he therefore accomplished all that he purposed.
In this case all lesser considerations, which tend to obstruct the great end of the work,
must yield and give way."88 Reynolds would have been the first to admit that paint-
ing can have a greater end than Rubens here fulfilled-such an end he discerned in the pro-
found and overpowering invention of Michelangelo on the Sistine ceiling"9 the greatness
of which, Reynolds knew, is no mere matter of rhetoric, or of pictorial brilliance, or, pace
Lessing, of bodily beauty either; nevertheless, on the subject of pictorial allegory Reynolds
spoke a more decisive word than Lessing when he continued his criticism of the Luxem-
bourg paintings as follows: "It must always be remembered that the business of a great
painter is to produce a great picture; he must therefore take special care not to be cajoled
by specious arguments out of his materials.
"What has been so often said to the disadvantage of allegorical poetry,-that it is
tedious, and uninteresting,-cannot with the same propriety be applied to painting, where
the interest is of a different kind. If allegorical painting produces a greater variety of ideal
beauty, a richer, a more various and delightful composition, and gives to the artist a greater
opportunity of exhibiting his skill, all the interest he wishes for is accomplished; such a
picture not only attracts, but fixes the attention."
Lessing would certainly have retorted that Rubens, like all painters of allegory, had
been cajoled out of his main argument by specious materials. And in so saying, he would
have again displayed that uncompromising dialectic that resulted in vital distinctions in
his criticism of poetry and painting, but which, because he did not understand painting,
and had adopted a narrow conception of her scope of imitation, left her, in reality, not
a sister of poetry at all, but a kind of lesser sister of sculpture bereft of her proper sen-
suousness and of her proper range of expression. Lessing had excellent reasons both as
a humanist and aesthetician for objecting probably to the bulk of allegorical painting. But
he would not have been able to distinguish between the pictorial and imaginative brilliance
of the Luxembourg series, and the "icily regular, splendidly null" allegorical histories, say,
of Le Brun.
III-EXPRESSION
When Lessing objected to predominant expression in historical painting, he objected
to something that the critics of the sixteenth century who developed the doctrine ut pictura
poesis had insisted upon as fundamental. For if human beings in action are, as Aristotle
said, the theme of painting, it follows that the movements of the body that express the
affections and passions of the soul are the spirit and the life of art and the goal to which the
whole science of painting tends. Lomazzo further insists that it is precisely here that
painting most resembles poetry; for the inspired genius of both arts lies in the knowledge
and power to express the passions, and the painter without expression, however perfect
a stylist or technician he may be, must be prepared to endure the censure of posterity.90
In the early Renaissance Alberti had included as essential to good composition an accurate
88. Discourse vn.
89. Discourse xv.
90. See Appendix 3, "Lomazzo on Expression."