Notes [Invention]

2. Art poetica 128-31:
"Difficile est proprie communia dicere; tuque
rectius Iliacum carmen deducis in actus
quam si proferres ignota indictaque primus.
publica materies privati iuris erit."

Ibid, 268-69:
"vos exemplaria Graeca
nocturna versate manu, versate diurna."

3. See Alberti, Della pittura, p. 105: "Grandissima opera del pictore sara l'istoria"; p. 109: "Grandissimo opera del pictore con uno colosso! ma istoria, maggiore loda d'ingegnio rende l'istoria che qual sia colosso."

4. See Appendix 2, "Inventio, Dispositio, Elocutio."

5. See note 78.

6. Discourse IV.

7. See Cicero, De oratore I. 34, 158: "Legendi etiam poetae, cognoscendae historiae, omnium bonarum artium doctores et scriptores eligendi et pervolutandi"; I. 16, 72, after he has noted the close affinities between orator and poet: "sic sentio neminem esse in oratorum numero habendum, qui non sit omnibus eis artibus, quae sunt libero dignae, perpolitus." Quintilian, Inst. orat. x. 1, 27: "Plurimum dicit oratori conferre Theophrastus lectionem poetarum. . . . Namque ab his in rebus spiritus et in verbis sublimitas et in adfectibus motus omnis et in personis decor petitur"; cf. Dolce, Dialogo, pp. 170-72: "Et è impossible, che il Pittore possegga bene le parti, che convengono alla inventione, si per conto della historia, come della convenevolezza, se non è pratico delle historie e delle favole de' Poeti. Onde si come è di grande utile a un letterato per le cose, che appartengono all'ufficio dello scrivere, il saper disegnare: cosi ancora sarebbe di molto beneficio alla profession del Pittore il saper lettere. Ma non essendo il Pittor letterato, sia almeno entendente, come io dico, delle historie, e delle Poesie, tenendo pratica di Poeti, e d'huomini dotti." But Dolce also argued (ibid., p. 251) that poets could learn from painters: if Raphael's painting of Alexander and Roxana recalls Lucian's famous description (Herodotus, chap. 4-6), so Virgil owed his Laokoön to the Rhodian sculptors. With Dolce's remarks on the "pittor letterato," one should compare Daniello's advice to the poet to become learned if he would produce fine inventions (La poetica, Venice, 1536, p. 27). Armenini, De'veri precetti della pittura, III, 15, pp. 234-35, shows the pedantic preciseness and the moral and religious bias of the Mannerist critic in exhorting the painter to read the Bible, the lives of Christ, the Madonna, the sainted Virgins and Martyrs, the saints' legendary, the lives of the Church Fathers, etc. Among profane works he advises first Plutarch; then Livy, Oppian, etc., and "gli uomini illustri del Petrarca, le Donne illustri del Boccaccio, e per la favola la Geneologia degli Dei del medesimo; di Alberico, cioè del Cartari, le Trasformazioni di Ovidio, o come è d'Antonio Apulejo, e l'Amadigi di Gaula"; cf. Lomazzo, Idea, p. 36.

8. Della pittura, p. 147: "Fidias, più che le altri pictori famoso, confessava avere imparato da Homero poeta*, dipingiere Jove con molta divina maestà. Cosi noi studios d'imparare più che di guadognio, da i nostri poeti imparessemo più et più cose utile alla pictura." Alberti may have owed the content of this passage to Valerius Maximus, De Factis dictisque memorabilibus, III, 7. Janitschek (in his edition of Alberti, op. cit., p. 244) finds a source in Strabo, Geography, VIII, C 354; cf. the tribute to Homer as the greatest creator of images of the gods that Dio Chrysostom puts into the mouth of Phidias (Twelfth, or Olympic Discourse, 57 ff.). Varchi, following Pliny, states (Due lezzioni, p. 116) that Zeuxis and Apelles owed respctively to Homer "le donne grandi e forzose," and "Diana fra un coro di Vergini"; he is archaeologically askew when he adds that the Campidoglio wolf was made after the image described by Cicero and later by Virgil.

9. Lomazzo, Trattato, vi, 2, pp. 281 ff.: ". . . il sentimento dell'istoria, che di qui ne nasce la buona compositione, parte tanto principale nella pittura che tanto ha del grave, e del buono, quanto è più simile al vero in tutte le parti . . . poeti, a' quali i pittori sono in molte parte simili; massime che cosi nel dipingere, come nel poetare vi corre il furor di Apolline, e l'uno e l'altro ha per oggetto i fatti illustri, e le lodi de gl'Heroi da rappresentare . . . Anci pare per non so quale consequenza che non possa essere pittore, chi insieme anco non habbia qualche spirito di poesia"; Lomazzo may have remembered here the saying of the elder Philostratus (Imagines I. 294k) that poets and painters contribute equally to our knowledge of the deeds and appearance of heroes; Reynolds writing on the grand style (Discourse IV) associates historical painting with the poetical: "In conformity to custom, I call this part of the art history-painting; it ought to be called poetical, as in reality it is."

10. Cf. Ars poetica 309 ff.; especially 317-18:
"respicere exemplar vitae morunque iubebo
doctum imitatorem et vivas hinc ducere voces."

11. De oratore I. 5, 17.

12. See Félibien's preface to his Conférences de l'Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, Paris, 1669. The Conférences are reprinted in vol. v of the edition of his Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres published at Trevoux in 1725; I quote from p. 310: "Il est constant qu'à mesure qu'ils (painters) s'occupent aux choses les plus difficiles et les plus nobles, ils sortent de ce qui'il y a de plus bas et de plus commun, et s'anoblissent par un travail plus illustre. Ainsi celui qui fait parfaitement des paisages* est au-dessus d'un autre qui ne fait que des fruits, des fleurs, ou des coquilles. Celui qui peint des animaux vivans est plus estimable que ceux qui ne représentent que des choses mortes et sans mouvement; et comme la figure de l'homme est le plus parfait ouvrage de Dieu sur la terre, il est certain aussi que celui qui se rend l'imitateur de Dieu en peignant des figures humaines, est beaucoup plus excellent que tous les autres . . . un Peintre qui ne fait que des portraits, n'a pas encore atteint cette haute perfection de l'Art, et ne peut prétendre à l'honneur que recoivent les plus sçavans. Il faut pour cela passer d'une seule figure à la représentation de plusieurs ensemble; il faut traiter l'histoire et la fable; il faut représenter de grandes actions comme les Historiens, ou des sujets agréable comme les Poetes*; et montant encore plus haut, il faut par des compositions allégoriques, sçavoir couvrir sous le voile de la fable les vertus des grands hommes, et les mystères les plus relevez. L'on appelle un grand Peintre celui qui s'acquitte bien de semblables entreprises." Félibien's remarks on allegory derive from the Renaissance theory of epic poetry, which was, of course, current in the seventeenth-century France. The epic was supposed to contain a hidden meaning beneath the veil of the action. See Spingarn, op. cit., pp. 107.

13. De Piles is still conservative enough to remark that it is reasonable to consider a history (he means a history in Félibien's sense of the term) the highest kind of painting, and that it is usual to contrast a history with a painting of beasts, or of landscapes, or of flowers, etc. Nevertheless, in including under the term "historical invention" (in contrast to what he calls allegorical, and mystical invention), true and fabulous history, portraiture, views of countries, beasts, and all the productions of art and nature, he is saying something new; and he shows a highly complimentary attitude toward the painter even of "the flower, fruit, plant, and insect" in remarking that even subjects such as these, that are not found in books or established by tradition, make demands on the painter's intelligence and inventive genius, and, he adds (and this is an old-fashioned compliment that no seventeenth-century Academician would have given any painting but a history in the strict sense of the word), are capable of yielding instruction. See Cours de peinture, pp. 53-55.

14. Discourse XI.

15. Nachlass C. (ed. Blümner, pp. 440-41):
"Der Ausdruck Korperlicher* Schonheit* ist die Bestimmung der Mahlerey.
"Die hochste* Korperliche* Schonheit* also, ihre hochste* bestimmung.
"Die hochste* Korperliche* Schonheit* existiert nur in dem Menschen, und auch nur in diesem vermoge* des Ideals.

"Dieses Ideal findet bey den Thieren schon weniger, in der vegetabilischen und leblosen Natur aber gar nicht Statt.
"Dieses ist es, was dem Blumen- und Landschaftsmahler seinen Rang anweiset.
"Er ahmet Schonheiten* nach, die keines Ideals fahig* sind; er arbeitet also bloss mit dem Auge und mit der Hand; und das Genie hat an seinem Werke wenig oder gar keinen Antheil.

"Doch ziehe ich noch immer den Landschaftsmahler demjenigen Historienmahler vor, der ohne seine Hauptabsicht auf die Schonheit* zu richten, nur Klumpen Personen mahlt, um seine Geschicklichkeit in dem blossen Ausdrucke, und nicht in dem der Schonheit* untergeordneten Ausdrucke, zu zeigen."

16. Babbitt, The New Laokoön, p. 46.

17. Lessing remarked (Laokoön, XVII) that the poet Kleist had he lived would have refashioned his descriptive poem Frühling in such a way as to convert "a series of pictures scantily interwoven with sentiments (Empfindungen) into a series of sentiments sparingly interspersed with images." For Lessing's objection to descriptive poetry as trespassing on the province of the painter's art, see note 29. He believed, of course, that progressive action (which would include "a series of sentiments") was the province of the poet.

18. Lessing's approbation of the expression of emotion in painting is characteristically confined in the Laokoün to certain ancient paintings, e.g., Timanthes' Sacrifice of Iphigenia, about which he had read in Pliny or elsewhere, but of which he could have had no direct experience. He has nothing to say in favor of expression in any modern painter. On the contrary, he objects Laokoün, III) to that enlargement of the realm of art in modern times which has permitted it to extend its imitations over all of visible nature in which beauty has only a small share, and he objects to the fact that truth and expression, not beauty, have become the first law of art. He praises Zeuxis (Ibid., XXII) who, although he knew Homer's famous lines in which the elders express their admiration of Helen's beauty, limited himself to painting only her naked beauty, and he violently objects to the painting based on the same lines in Homer that the Comte de Caylus proposed for modern artists: Helen covered in a white veil on the walls of Troy in the midst of Priam and the elders--a painting in which the artist must exert his particular skill, says Caylus, to make us feel the triumph of beauty in the eager looks and expressions of astonishment on the faces of the elders. Lessing's excellent doctrine of the fruitful moment for the plastic artist (ibid., III) in which he was to some extent anticipated by Shaftesbury, Du Bos, and Caylus himself, rightly limits the depiction of expression to that least transitory moment in emotional experience which would permit the beholder of a picture to imagine in temporal terms more than the painter with his single moment of time could actually represent. But he never in the Laokoün comments on the application of this doctrine to expression in the work of any modern painter. He was evidently more interested in the kind of formal beauty that the unseen Helen of Zeuxis represented to him. For the "Menge schoner* Korper*, in shonen* Stellungen" in Homer see ibid., XVI. See p. 260 and note 305.

19. See p. 3 above.

20. Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, 6th ed., Paris, 1735, I, 24, p. 194 (first ed. 1719). Cf. De Piles' earlier criticism of Le Brun on precisely these grounds (Abrégé de la vie des peintres., p. 511): Le Brun, he admits, treated allegorical subjects with much imagination, "mais au lieu d'en tirer les symboles de quelque source connue, comme de la Fable, et des Médailles antiques, il les a presque tous inventés, ainsi ces sortes de tableaux deviennent par-là des énigmes, que le spectateur ne veut pas se donner la peine d'éclaircir." Cf. note 176.

21. Ibid., p. 197.

22. Discourse VII.

23. Discourse XV.

* Symbol for the phonetic accent in this word not available on the computer.