V. Decorum

There was another aspect of decorum not so specifically defined by Horace as were its connotations of the typical, but nevertheless present in the Ars poetica, and closely related to that inobtrusive tone of urbane admonition that informs much of the poem and changes to positive utterance near the end when the poet declares the didactic and moral uses of poetry,^ and describes the noble rôle that the art has played in bringing civilization to mankind.^ This was the notion, of great importance in the later history of criticism, that decorum means not only the suitable representation of typical aspects of human life, but also specific conformity to what is decent and proper in taste, and even more in morality and religion.^ Although in this last sense it had been implicit in Alberti,^ it is absent in the empirical Leonardo, for whom prescribed forms in morality and religion probably had little significance; but the examples of indecorum noted by the critics after 1550, and particularly towards the end of the century, nearly always suggest the immoral, irreverent, or undignified, rather than the unrepresentative or improbable; and the critics, mindful of what they consider the didactic function of art, are chiefly concerned that it shall be as edifying as possible. When Dolce in 1557 cites as reasonable and sound criticism Ghiberti's complaint to Donatello that when he made a crucifix he hung a peasant, not an ideal figure upon the cross,^ or when he objects to Dürer's painting the Virgin and saints in German habits,^ he speaks, one may believe, both as a man of classical taste who favored the generalizing, not the realistic, mode of representation, and as an apologist for propriety in religious painting. When Borghini, however, in 1584 blames Bronzino for the introduction of nudes into his Christ in Limbo,^ he is no longer an aesthetic critic at all, but merely a moralist who sees in the irreverent treatment of the subject an incitement to carnal desire. But the most celebrated example of impropriety for the later sixteenth century was Michelangelo's Last Judgment, and the age of the Counter-Reform nowhere expresses itself in criticism more directly than in those writers who in the name of Horatian decorum take the heroic artist to task, not only for the mild aesthetic and factual impropriety of failing to distinguish between the sexes in the rendering of muscles, but especially for the very [p. 37] serious violation of modesty, decency, and sacred truth in turning a sublime religious subject into a display of anatomical invention. Already in 1557 Dolce, speaking through the mouth of Aretino who some ten years before in his brilliantly abusive letter had told Michelangelo that his art belonged in a brothel rather than in the Sistine,^ declares that in the chapel of God's earthly representative the nakedness of sacred personages is intolerable, and that improper pictures, far more than improper books--a curious extension, if one likes, of the implications of ut pictura poesis--should be placed upon the Index.^ This severity of judgment, while it echoes the ironic hyperbole of the irreligious Aretino, is yet entirely in keeping with the spirit of the age, although Dolce who admired the rich naturalism of Titian and considered the classicizing Raphael the paragon of decorum, really objects to Michelangelo more, one may believe, on the grounds of style than of propriety, finding the Florentine's muscularity and violent action greatly to his distaste. In the next decade, however, a less humanistic critic, the cleric Gilio da Fabriano, who writes a dialogue on painting that is in good part an actual commentary on various passages from the Ars poetica,^ just as if Horace had written the poem in the first place for painters rather than for poets, iedntifies decorum not only with a sense of reverent propriety due the mysteries of the faith, but also with the strict observance of the truth of scriptural narrative.^ He blames Michelangelo^ not only for the gratuitous nakedness of his figures,^ or because the angels who bear the Instruments of the Passion comport themselves like acrobats,^ but also because the wind appears to move hair and garments when there could have been no wind, "for on that day the winds and tempests will have ceased";^ or the Resurrection occurs gradually with people now skeletons, now half now fully clothed with flesh, when St. Paul had written that it would be accomplished in the twinkling of an eye;^ or people rise [p. 38] from the dead now decrepit and bald, now young, in fact of every age, when it is written that on the last day there shall be no age nor youth, nor any deformity of body;^ or the Virgin turns away from Christ, as if fearing that she herself were unprotected from his wrath;^ or Charon's bark appears without the sanction of historical truth even though Michelangelo owed its introduction to the greatest of Italian poets.^ For poetry and theology, says Gilio, are sharply opposed, and when Michelangelo painted an important article of the faith, it was his business to imitate the theologians, not the poets.^

Gilio had, however, no objection to the poets provided the painter chose the proper moment to use them. And in the categorizing manner of his age he divides painters into three groups--poetical, historical, and mixed painters.^ The first are like the poets in being free to invent their subjects provided they follow Horace's advice to follow nature and avoid the incongruous, whereas the second group, as we have seen, are not free to invent at all,^ at least if one includes in a definition of invention any imaginative treatment of one's religious or historical subject. The third group, who have much in common, says Gilio, with the great epic poets of antiquity, mix fact with fiction in a delightful manner as Virgil did, for instance, when he added the purely fabulous account of Aeneas' sojourn with Dido to a story which in the main was historically correct.^ And it is in the domain of allegory and symbolism where fact and fancy frequently mingle that the painters owe much to the antique poets, and even more to those sculptors who carved on the Roman triumphal arches personifications of Victory, Peace, and the City of Rome, whence the Christians learned to give human form to the theological virtues.^ These are admitted in sacred art, Gilio characteristically adds, "for no other reason than because they are virtues, for the purity of religion wants nothing but what is virtuous, especially when it comes to allegorical figures."^ There follows a warning to the painters that recalls the later sentiments of De Piles and Du Bos that the spectator must be able to understand these mixtures of truth and fiction without undue mental effort.^ And it is worth noting that Gilio's threefold division of poetical, historical, and mixed painters has its later counterpart in the threefold activity already discussed which FÚlibien was to assign to the grand peintre of the seventeenth century. [p. 39]

But a few allegorical figures, and only because they are sanctioned by antique example, are almost the sole deviation from factual truth that the jealous theologians will allow in religious painting.^ and they can hardly be said to afford much scope to the imagination. Otherwise the painter of religious subjects is, as we have seen, one who paints the literal facts of history, and it is evident that he must have sufficient learning, let alone orthodox habits of mind, to paint pictures that will pass muster with the most uncompromising theologians. The concept that a painter like a poet must be learned in the interest of decorum, will be discussed later. Here it may be further observed that criticism like Gilio's, although it shows no interest whatsoever in formal beauty and evinces in its theological pedantry a painful misunderstanding of the grandeur of Michelangelo's profoundly personal interpretation of his subject, has nevertheless this much to be said in its favor: when Gilio asserts that the immoderate contortions of Michelangelo's angels are to display the power of art [la forza d'arte ],^ and that Michelangelo has not erred through ignorance, but though a desire to serve art rather than the truths of religion,^ he strikes not merely at the manneristic extravagance of Michelangelo's late style, but, what is more important, through Michelangelo at the general tendency in Mannerist art to sacrifice meaning to empty aestheticism. And in one of the most interesting of a number of passages in Gilio's book that might serve as texts for a lecture on the aesthetic extravagance of the Mannerist style, the author, after remarking that errors of fact in painting are due to ignorance and might be avoided if the painters were only men of letters and took the trouble to inform themselves about their subjects, and that "they appear to think that they have paid their debt when they have made a saint and have put all their genius and diligence into twisting awry the legs, or the arms, or the neck; and in a violent manner that is both unseemly and ugly."^ Through the dark glass, therefore, of crabbed and impercipient clericalism one may discern in Gilio not only the need of a deeper religious content in human life, but also the aesthetic need that the Baroque style later attempted to satisfy, of more adequate forms of expression.^

The dialogue is further significant as indicating along with other documents of the time^ the temporary impoverishment of humanistic values that accompanied the breakdown of the Classical Renaissance in the sixteenth century, and the policy of the Church to press the arts into the service of morality and Christian dogma. For the student of the theory ut pictura poesis, it is illuminating as showing how the concept of artistic decorum which in Horace's own mind was not devoid of moral implication, could acquire under particular historical conditions a dogmatic significance in which its classical connotations of representative truth were entirely lost. Painting, since its content was that of poetry, [p. 40] and since its effects on human emotion were the same, was subject to the same laws of decorum; and if it dealt with religious subjects, it had accordingly to be a categorically exact, as well as a vivid and moving, illustration of the facts of Christian history and the truths of theology. This specialized application of the Horatian concept did not outlast the Mannerist period, but it helped to encourage the view that persisted in the following century that decorum implied not only representative truth, but truth that was morally edifying as well. Herein for the seventeenth century, as for Horace, lay its connection with the precept that art should instruct as well as delight. In the preface to his Conférences de l'Académie Félibien, for instance, regarded decorum [bienséance ] as "one of the most necessary elements in painting to instruct the ignorant, and one of the most agreeable in the eyes of the learned."^

That it might well be both is apparent from his remarks on decorum that immediately precede this thoroughly Horatian observation. For they reveal that close connection between learning and the ability to render things with strict appropriateness already remarked in Gilio da Fabriano. "Decorum must be observed," writes Félibien, out-horacing Horace, "in regard to ages, sexes, countries, different professions, manners and customs, passions, and usages of dress appropriate to each nation. Herein is Raphael admirable, but not so Titian and Veronese."^ The formalistic implications of a passage like this--and one will immediately think of the aridly conventional gestures and expression of much French painting of the late seventeenth century--are sufficiently obvious. It is clear, moreover, that if the artist is successfully to observe decorum in its diverse ramifications, he must get his facts straight about a great variety of men and nations, both ancient and modern; he must in short be possessed of a truly uncommon erudition. Hence it is that the critics frequently undertake to instruct the painters in what they must know if they are to be historical painters worthy of the name. What they tell them, often at great length, Boileau, instructing the poet concerning decorum, sums up in three lines:

Conservez à chacun son propre caractère.

Des siècles, des pais, étudiez les mþurs,

Les climats font souvent les diverses humeurs.^

[pp. 34-41]

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