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I do not recommend them with a view that you should adopt the style and character of any of them; but to show from those great examples, that style and character, although ever founded in nature, are as various as the individual genius of every artist; that they are as free to you as they were to those masters; that if you will consult your own mind, you will draw forth a style and character of your own, and therefore no man can ever be excused for sinking into a mannerist.
Lucia. St. Michaelina. These are the best pictures of BAROCCIO already exhibited. His colouring is enchanting. It is entirely transparent and seems as if impregnated with light: however, his forms, and every thing else, bespeak the mannerist. N deg. 721. The Resurrection of Christ. The Nativity of Christ. Christ laid in the tomb. Of the CARRACCI, ANNIBALE is the most perfect.
For my part, I am slow to believe that the judgment of the whole English-speaking race, a judgment maintained over more than half a century, can be altogether wrong; and the writer who has given such delight, has influenced so many writers, and has taught so much to so many persons, can hardly have been a shallow mannerist, or an ungovernable partisan.
I too see that painting and sculpture are gymnastics of the eye, its training to the niceties and curiosities of its function. There is no statue like this living man, with his infinite advantage over all ideal sculpture, of perpetual variety. What a gallery of art have I here! No mannerist made these varied groups and diverse original single figures.
He lived largely in an atmosphere of poetic pleasantry, which served as an alleviation to his cares and as an attraction to his friends. Cranch did not always succeed so well. He never became a mannerist, but there was too much similarity in his subjects, and the treatment too often bordered on the commonplace.
He writes: "She is, to my eyes, the most soul-subduing actress I ever saw; I do not mean from her personal charms, which are great, but from the truth, force, and pathos of her acting. I have never been so completely melted, moved, and overcome at a theatre as by her performances.... Kean, the prodigy, is to me insufferable. He is vulgar, full of trick, and a complete mannerist.
"Still we can't be certain how much of all this may be owing to the mere mannerisms of successive schools of art," urged Müller, sticking manfully to his own opinion. "Where will you find a more decided mannerist than Holbein? And because he was the first portrait-painter of his day, was he not reproduced with all his faults of literalness and dryness by a legion of imitators?
He may be himself the most curious opposition to himself he may be the greatest mannerist of his age while denouncing conventionalism the greatest talker while eulogising silence the most woful complainer while glorifying fortitude the most uncertain and stormy in mood, while holding forth serenity as the greatest good within the reach of man; but he has nevertheless infused into the mind of the English nation a sincerity, earnestness, healthfulness, and courage which can be appreciated only by those who are old enough to tell what was our morbid state when Byron was the representative of our temper, the Clapham church of our religion, and the rotten-borough system of our political morality. We have no quarrel with this account of the greatest man of letters of our generation.
Yet, while she assumes the airs of a fine lady, she takes care to dwell on the slightest equivoque; so that what would be no more than gay in the mouth of another woman, in hers becomes indecent. As she is a mannerist in her acting, some think it perfect, and they say too that she is charming. However, she must have been very handsome.
It is observable, that it is impossible to imitate with uniform felicity the noble simplicity of a pathetic writer; while the peculiarities of a mannerist are so far from being difficult, that they are displayed with nice exactness by middling writers, who, although their own natural manner had nothing interesting, have attracted notice by such imitations.
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