Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 9/Studios in Florence - Part 1
STUDIOS IN FLORENCE.
No. I.
I have always maintained, in spite of Gray’s hackneyed verses, that merit, like murder, will betray itself, especially in these days, when avalanches of words, cataracts of ink, and pyramids of books, fall on us from every quarter of the globe, in praise or dispraise, explanation or entanglement, support or attack, of every conceivable subject. This is essentially the age when, by one party, at least, every goose has, sooner or later, the chance of being taken for a swan; though, alas! it is also true, that by the other party some really noble swans are looked upon as geese. But aspirants to fame now, at all events, are known. Their good or ill is discussed. Most of them are sure to obtain the excitement of encouragement or opposition. The deadly upas of obscurity does not poison them. There are, however, exceptions. A man who earns his bread in one of the learned professions, and can only indulge or cultivate his taste for art at intervals, is often debarred from just appreciation by the conventional limitations which the world places on excellence. His profession is a disadvantage to his art, his art is a disadvantage to his profession; when the public ear is absorbed in listening to the echoes of one kind of glory, it is for a time utterly deaf to every other; and when, in the sudden new birth of a country, a spirit of political ardour and commercial enterprise awakens, it temporarily effaces the impression made by other manifestations of the public spirit. It is, I suppose, owing to one or other of those reasons that the works of art which I lately visited are less known than they should be. There are a number of sculptors’ studios in and about the Via de Serragh, Florence. Many are congregated in a large old building about midway between the Carraja Bridge and the Roman Gate.
In a studio in this house are the St. Stephen and the Wounded Gladiator, which were the objects of my first visit.
The St. Stephen is a bust hewn out of granite. It is a noble head. A Christian Laocoon, sublime in its expression of suffering, sublimer still in its expression of faith. There is admirable art in the way the whole figure is suggested, from the pose of the head and shoulders. We see that the martyr has fallen on one knee, beaten down by his relentless foes. His head is thrown back, as he awaits his death pang. He is an old man, with a face ploughed with lines of care and thought; the temples are slightly hollowed, and the sunken, upturned eyes are calm, trusting, and invincible. Only on the lips, which are parted, can we read the plain signs of the intense physical suffering; but as legible is the indomitable resolution of the face. No victim, but a self-devoted sacrifice. In this lies the subtle difference between this head and that of the old Greek marvel. St. Stephen triumphs over death—Laocoon endures it. With the one, death is the man’s imperious choice—with the other, death is the man’s inflicted doom. St. Stephen seems to say, “The truth which I attest may slay me, but it is my will to give my witness to it; come shame, come torture, come death, I accept them—truth and I are stronger than they.” We could almost expect that the next moment the visible glory of the victory will hallow him, and that we shall see his face shine as the face of an angel.
The grey colour of the granite out of which it has been cut suits the severe grandeur of the head, and harmonises with the whole expression. Chiselled out from the block at once, without passing through the intermediate stages of clay and plaster, there is a spontaneity, if we may so term it, about this work which would appear to realise the old legend, that the sculptor did not create his bust or statue out of his materials, but only liberated an already existent figure from its shroud of stone.[1]
The other figure is an entirely realistic portraiture of an athlete. He has raised his arm to strike, but at the very moment has received his death-blow. There is a deep dent on his helmet on the left side, just above the forehead. The effect of such a blow would cause a man to whirl round as he falls, and thus is he represented. The left leg is bent: the weight of the figure is on it. The right is stretched out at its full tension just before the figure sways leftwards as it sinks down. The effect of this line, from the arm upraised above the head (grasping the weapon and in the act of dealing the blow), along the side, thigh, and leg, is beautiful. The development of the chest, the muscular strength of the limbs, the fulness of life in the whole figure, are forcibly expressed, but without exaggeration. The muscles do not stand out like ropes around a fleshless torso; there is athletic strength, the perfection of trained manhood, but no gauntness or unsightliness; sound elastic flesh clothes sinews powerful as steel. The hand which holds the sword has closed on it with the rigidity of death. The passage from life to death is portrayed with great fidelity. The art-students in Paris, who saw this figure on its way from Boston to Florence, were so struck with its marvellous truth that they decided it must be a trick; that it had been moulded on a living man. They declared it impossible otherwise that certain details could be rendered with such exactness. The absurdity of such an opinion is self-evident. No model could remain in such an attitude. He must inevitably fall.
There is no idealisation attempted in this figure. It is to the minutest fibre an athlete and nothing more. What particularly struck me, both in the bust and the figure, was the finish and delicacy of the modelling. The wrinkles in the face of St. Stephen, the hollowness of the cheeks, the swollen veins round the sunken temples, the bony projection of the forehead over the eyes, are singularly lifelike. So, too, with the Gladiator. The massive yet elegant proportions, the noble throat, the herculean chest, the vigorous tension of one side contrasted with the fast approaching collapse of the other, are all instinct with vitality.
The smooth, hard, flat surface, which so many sculptors seem to think expressive of beauty, is a falsehood. To learn to see, and seeing to copy, the undulations and indentations of the human body which prove that blood and life are beneath the skin, is the secret of art. In painting, what wonderful lights, what tender shadows, what exquisite chiaro-oscuro reveal them; and in sculpture, what breaking up into soft swellings and almost imperceptible lines is necessary before the hard material can be changed into living flesh. This has been done by this sculptor. But who is he?
Dr. Bremner, of Boston, is now at the head of a school of art established by the Lowell Institute. Up to this time, however, he has had few oportunities of following his art-calling. The exigencies of life have made him a professional man, but there are voices which call even louder than the demand for daily broad, and which no man can disobey. In the intervals of his medical avocations, and under every possible disadvantage, these two works have been executed, and prove what Dr. Bremner is capable of.
The bust was, as I have said, hewn out of the granite. Every twenty minutes the chisels became blunted, and it was necessary to sharpen them. So vivid was the conception of the head, that the block of granite was cut down at once into the present pose. Owing to some accident, the clay in which the figure of the Gladiator was modelled, cracked, and began to fall before the figure was half finished. A cast was taken of it as it stood, and the rest of the figure was cut in the plaster.
In our estimate of works of art, I think it a mistake to make the difficulties or hindrances attendant on their execution excuse their faults. They should be judged intrinsically, with no reference to aught but themselves. But when these difficulties or hindrances are so successfully overcome, our admiration of the workman who has persevered so manfully with his work is enhanced, and we revere what Balzac calls the sublime patience of genius. As I stood for a moment outside the studio, and looked at the blue and cloudless sky above, I could not help thinking how long Italy had monopolised all the utterances of the soul; how adapted its climate, its religion, and the idiosyncrasy of its people, are to Art in the widest acceptation of the term; and yet, how far from Italian culture and Italian influences some of the great ones of the earth had wrought their work. Never was the glorious independence of genius more impressed on my mind than at this moment. An absorbing profession, poverty, inadequate mechanical means, deficiency in art companionship and in the power of art contemplation, had not prevented a true artist from thus executing works which only require to be known to take a foremost place in the most elaborately selected collections of modern art.
- ↑ There are witnesses who can prove this remarkable fact.