Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843

In speaking of Timanthes as the competitor with Parrhasius, as one who brought into the art more play of the mind and passions, the lecturer takes occasion to discuss the often discussed and disputed propriety of Timanthes, in covering the head of Agamemnon in his picture of the sacrifice of Iphigenia. He thinks it the more incumbent on him so to do, as the "late president" had passed a censure upon Timanthes. Sir Joshua expressed his doubt only, not his censure absolutely, upon the delivery of the prize at the Academy for the best picture painted from this subject. He certainly dissents from bestowing the praise, upon the supposition of the intention being the avoiding a difficulty. And as to this point, the well-known authorities of Cicero, Quintilian, Valerius Maximus, and Pliny, seem to agree. And if , as the lecturer observes in a note, the painter is made to waste expression on inferior actors at the expense of a principal one, he is an improvident spendthrift, not a wise economist. The pertness of Falconet is unworthy grave criticism and the subject, though it is quoted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He assumes that Agamemnon is the principal figure. Undoubtedly Mr Fuseli is right—Iphigenia is the principal figure; and it may be fairly admitted, that the overpowering expression of the grief of the father would have divided the subject. It might be more properly a separate picture. Art is limited; nothing should detract from the principal figure, the principal action—passion. Our sympathy is not called for on behalf of the father here: the grief of the others in the picture is the grief in perfect sympathy with Iphigenia; the father would have been absorbed in his own grief, and his grief would have been an unsympathetic grief towards Iphigenia. It was his own case that he felt; and it does appear to us an aggravation of the suffering of Iphigenia, that, at the moment of her sacrifice, she saw indeed her father's person, but was never more—and knew she was never more—to behold his face again. This circumstance alone would justify Timanthes, but other concurrent reasons may be given. It was no want of power to express the father's grief, for it is in the province of art to express every such delineation; but there is a point of grief that is ill expressed by the countenance at all; and there is a natural action in such cases for the sufferer himself to hide his face, as if conscious that it was not in agreement with his feelings. Such grief is astounding: we look for the expression of it, and find it not: it is better than receive this shock to hide the face. We do it naturally; so that here the art of the painter, that required that his picture should be a whole, and centre in Iphigenia, was mainly assisted by the proper adoption of this natural action of Agamemnon. Mr Fuseli, whose criticism is always acute, and generally just and true, has well discussed the subject, and properly commented upon the flippancy of Falconet. After showing the many ways in which the painter might have expressed the parent's grief, and that none of them would be decere, pro dignitate, digne , he adds—'But Timanthes had too true a sense of nature to expose a father's feelings, or to tear a passion to rags; nor had the Greeks yet learned of Rome to steel the face. If he made Agamemnon bear his calamity as a man, he made him also feel it as a man. It became the leader of Greece to sanction the ceremony with his presence: it did not become the father to see his daughter beneath the dagger's point: the same nature that threw a real mantle over the face of Timoleon, when he assisted at the punishment of his brother, taught Timanthes to throw an imaginary one over the face of Agamemnon; neither height nor depth, propriety of expression was his aim.' It is a question whether Timanthes took the idea from the text of Euripides, or whether it is his invention, and was borrowed by the dramatist. The picture must have presented a contrast to that of his rival Parrhasius, which exhibited the fury of Ajax.

Whether the invention was or was not the merit of Euripides, certainly this is not the only instance wherein he has turned it to dramatic advantage. No dramatist was so distinct a painter as Euripides; his mind was ever upon picture. He makes Hecuba, in the dialogue with Agamemnon, say, "Pity me, and, standing apart as would a painter, look at me, and see what evils I have,"

Οιχτειρον ημας, ως γραφευς τ αποοταθεις,

Ιδα με χαναθρησον, οι εχω χαχα.

And this Hecuba, when Talthybius comes to require her presence for the burial of Polyxena, is found lying on the ground, her face covered with her robe:—

Αυτη πελας σα, νωτ εχασ επι χθονι,

Ταλθυβιε, κειται σνγκχλεισμενη πεπλοις.

And in the same play, Polyxena bids Ulysses to cover her head with a robe, as he leads her away, that she might not see her mother's grief.

Κομιζ, Οδνσσευ, μ'αμφιθεις πεπλοις χαρα.

But in the instance in question, in the Iphigenia, there is one circumstance that seems to have been overlooked by the critics, which makes the action of Agamemnon the more expressive, and gives it a peculiar force: the dramatist takes care to exhibit the more than common parental and filial love; when asked by Clytemnestra what would be her last, her dying request, it is instantly, on her father's account, to avert every feeling of wrath against him:—

Πατερα γε τον εμον μη στυγει, ποσιν τε σον.

And even when the father covers his face, she is close beside him, tells him that she is beside him , and her last words are to comfort him. Now, whether Timanthes took the scene from Euripides or Euripides from Timanthes, it could not be more powerfully, more naturally conceived; for this dramatic incident, the tender movement to his side, and speech of Iphigenia, could not have been imagined, or at least with little effect, had not the father first covered his face. Mr Fuseli has collected several instances of attempts something similar in pictures, particularly by Massaccio, and Raffaelle from him; and he well remarks—"We must conclude that Nature herself dictated to him this method, as superior to all he could express by features; and that he recognized the same dictate in Massaccio, who can no more be supposed to have been acquainted with the precedent of Timanthes than Shakspeare with that of Euripides, when he made Macduff draw his hat over his face." From Timanthes Mr Fuseli proceeds to eulogize Aristides; whom history records as, in a peculiar excellence, the painter of the passions of nature. "Such, history informs us, was the suppliant whose voice you seemed to hear, such his sick man's half-extinguished eye and labouring breast, such Byblis expiring in the pangs of love, and, above all, the half-slain mother shuddering lest the eager babe should suck the blood from her palsied nipple."—"Timanthes had marked the limits that discriminate terror from the excess of horror; Aristides drew the line that separates it from disgust." Then follows a very just criticism upon instances in which he considered that Raffaelle himself and Nicolo Poussin had overstepped the bounds of propriety, and averted the feelings from their object, by ideas of disgust. In the group of Raffaelle, a man is removing the child from the breast of the mother with one hand, while the other is applied to his nostrils. Poussin, in his plague of the Philistines, has copied the loathsome action—so, likewise, in another picture, said to be the plague of Athens, but without much reason so named, in the collection of J. P. Mills, Esq. Dr Waagen, in his admiration for the executive part of art, speaks of it as "a very rich masterpiece of Poussin, in which we are reconciled by his skill to the horrors of the subject."