A Modern Religious Painter

IN the church of Saint-Germain des Prés, the oldest church in Paris, situated in the Rue Bonaparte, now a dense quarter of the most poetical part of the city, Flandrin has painted his frescos illustrative of the Old and New Testament. This church, to which artists and pietists wend their way, is the sacred jewel of the Catholic religion in France. Thanks to its ancient origin and Flandrin’s art, it is more beautiful than the intense and florid Sainte-Chapelle, or the costly Saint-Denis. It shows its Roman origin ; it is a work that antedates the Gothic ; looking at it you behold the church architecture of France in the eleventh century. It is Norman-Roman, that is to say, a simple and grave structure, with a tower, characterized by the Roman column and early Gothic capital, full of grotesque and quaint carvings. The interior decoration, which is modern, gives lustre and beauty to it ; the frescos make the Bible stories pictorially intelligible and persuasive to all but the blind. You enter, perhaps, at twelve o’clock. The gray and plain front, the dust-covered, time-eaten colonettes of the great door, scarcely attract your attention, and you have no expectation of anything rarely beautiful and uncommon. But the moment you pass the great door, you behold the most unique and celestial looking interior of any church in Paris. The color chants to the eye ! As the old stained windows of cathedrals sing, these walls chant. The weight of human sadness and the soberness of sorrow is in the sense of the color as in the chant of male voices. A combination of all low, rich, and solemnly subdued tones, in the flat-tinted decoration of the walls and columns, makes this impression upon you. The gamut of color begins with low, strong, earthly red, and mounts up to the deep nocturnal blue of the ceiling, star-sprinkled ; and on column and wall lines of pale, pure green and gold and gray are mingled with masses of red, black, and ochorous flat tints. While you look upon this novel interior, the soft, plaintive voice of the almost humanized bells strikes the fleeting hours. Amid the dying sounds chimed over your head, the processioned-step of pious nun or prayerful priest about you, by the chant of male voices in far-off chapel, struck into reverence by all revered things, — sacred vessels, the bent figures of silent old women, and memorial-stones half obliterated, — you seem to have passed out of the world and entered a probationary and preparatory temple to have your material and worldly mind attuned to all subdued and spiritual things.

Along the side of the nave just above the Roman arches, under the Gothic vault, you see the frescos of Flandrin, in flat and pale colors, in firm and pure lines, in simple and large forms, making a place like an illuminated margin to a beautiful book of religious sentiment. Here are all the episodes of Bible history, all the grand and beautiful figures such as a devout, spiritual, reverent, and reserved mind imagines them to be. Beside these designs Doré’s illustrations of the Bible are the bold and brutal exaggerations of a genius sunk in low, childish, and physical things.

Flandrin’s most remarkable works are the two large frescos on each side of the choir. High over the altar, almost in the centre of the church, seen against a gold-checkered background, you behold Christ seated on a white ass. He is in the midst of a procession of men and women bearing palms, who express a holy and restrained joy. In front of Christ, at the gates of the city, men and women of Jerusalem, with uplifted arms, garlands of flowers, and expectant, gravely glad faces, welcome the august and placid Master. To me this is the one supreme picture of modern religious art. The Divine Master sits peacefully upon the ass, a benignant and serene man, lonely in the midst of friends, the companion of all, but familiar with none. The crowd, unlike a vulgar crowd, raise their hands and heads in a decorous and dignified manner. In Flandrin’s work everything is separated from the domain of the common ; it is separated as his arbitrary but logical faith separated the events and characters of the Bible from every-day and natural things. Flandrin’s art is ideal, as his faith was ideal, and, to both alike, realism would be destructive.

The crowd, we repeat, is unlike a vulgar crowd. The folks express a holy joy not the tumult and gladness with which a conqueror was greeted at the gates of ancient cities. Everything about the work is reasoned and restrained ; yet it has a lyric depth of emotion, a lyric fervor in its studied and simple composition. If you could care more for the artistic traits of such a work than for its spiritual meaning, I should call your attention to the noble shapes, the sure and firm lines, the classic symmetry of form, the thorough, yet unpedantic knowledge of the human figure, the remarkable dignity and grace of the draperies. The draperies are exceptionally fine ; they have the beauty of Greek sculpture. I should ask you to observe the systematic and consistent use of color, and all that makes a perfect, but not dazzling expression of such a theme. It is a grave and beautiful work.

Flandrin’s use of color is that of a man conscious of his limitations as a colorist. But he understood the intellectual sense of color. Yet like Scheffer, the clay of the soil, rather than the tint of flowers and the azure of the sky, ran through all his combinations. It is as if his spiritual sense was clouded in this direction, and he never knew the pure song, the gladness and exultation of vivid and intense colors ; all that would have been destructive to the renouncing and morbid spirit, the restraining piety, with which his serene but unexultant soul pleased itself. He had not the natural or artistic sense of color. You see that in his masses, in his flat tints, he was simply judicious, merely taking his work out of black and white. A great sense of color or of tone is not consistent with common theology or the meditations of the ascetic or pious mind. It belongs to joyous, strong men, who are content with this fair, natural inheritance of the world. Flandrin was not such a man, but a timid, pensive, aspiring man. Correctness and symmetry of form was the main article of his art-creed. His drawing was pure and correct, like Ingres’s ; his system of color logical and consistent, never once unexpected and magic in its results.

Flandrin, by dint of study and meditation, got outside of the real world with its glory and its shame, and devoted himself to express in a pictorial and studied form the precious and beautiful subjects of the Bible. He was more exclusively a religious painter than Ary Scheffer, for he was not embarrassed by anything modern and romantic. Passion had not clouded and moral suffering had not deepened his spiritual sense, as in Scheffer’s case. By pure piety he attained spiritual clearness and spiritual depth. Without a great imagination, but with an inventive faculty disciplined by the study of classic and Roman art, and with a great knowledge of the expression of the human face, he was enabled to produce a series of works of great variety of design, not one showing any accidental beauty or chance felicity, but all alike the result of thoughtful consideration, all alike judiciously worked out. If ever a painter was born to express sincerely and beautifully a logical and arbitrary faith, if ever a man was penetrated with the truth of the expressive and far-reaching Hebraic fables, it was Hippolyte Flandrin.

Like a cloistered monk, but admitted to more universal studies, he fervidly felt, as, with the hand of a master, he illustrated, the stories he believed. It is worthy of remark that, in his treatment of Adam and Eve, he keeps his hands pure from the sensual and pagan beauty which other painters would have illustrated in the painting of two nude figures ; it is worthy of remark how habitual is the dignity and purity of his sentiment. Whether I look at the serene majesty of his fresco of “Christ’s Entrance into Jerusalem,” or at the dark and fatal “ Procession to the Cross,” at the “ Birth of Jesus,” or at “ Moses,” I am alike struck with the expressive and admirable form of his art, the gentle and persuasive temper of the painter, the pure and fervid piety of his sentiment. A man going from the feverish and fatal life of Paris to Flandrin’s frescos in SaintGermain des Prés, must be deeply moved and chastely admonished, as by the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, for he looks upon the artistic and pure illustration of its temper and faith. Given the stand point of adevout Catholic, and Flandrin’s pictures seem instinct with the tenderness, pathos, and solicitude of the Redeemer. The condescension and humility of a god are painted. The tenderness, the mute reproach of the suffering of a blameless man, all the ecstatic and oft-memorialized events of the life of Christ, as felt and understood by a pious soul, and are there to move you to tears.

In the fresco of the “ Last Supper,” the figure of Judas is presented in a very original shape. It is imagined as the simple and unworldly imagine it ; it is a remarkable example of dramatic force and suggestion, judas sits with his back to the spectator. His face is not visible, but the character of the man is as manifest as if the hand of Leonardo da Vinci had painted his visage turned full upon you in all its envious and malignant enormity of sin. “ Ignoble and base,” you say, as you look at the back of Judas. By exaggerating the backbone, articulating it through the drapery and arching it as in the dragon form, Flandrin has made a strangely wicked-looking Judas. It is perfectly effective, and the exaggeration is done with so much artistic refinement, that you are compelled to admire it. Realism would never tolerate such portraiture, much less believe it.

Judas probably had the face of a politician. Being devoid of any spiritual sense, when he saw that Christ’s kingdom was not of this world, and had no fat office, knowing the finances were low, he concluded to dispose of his “ knowledge of persons ” to a legitimate and powerful party ! He betrayed his master and friend. The thing is often done, and by men without the dragonback of Flandrin’s Judas, which does very well as a physical deformity to express the moral monstrosity of the prudent disciple.

In the fresco of the “ Birth of Christ ” Flandrin has attained to something of Raphael’s grace and beauty of design, Raphael’s tender and womanly types, Raphael’s perfect composition. The face of the Virgin mother shines luminous and sweet, over the cradle of the child, rapt, embracing, adoring, — assuredly one of the most lovely creations of modern art. In this work, as in most of Flandrin’s productions, you remark that he has accepted all the traditional types and forms of which Raphael and Cimabue are the originators ; by his personal force he has vitalized them and lifted them out of the domain of academic art.

Flandrin did for the Christian traditions and types what Ingres did for classic traditions and types, that is, he illustrated them with the science of a thorough artist ; to Scheffer’s sentiment he added Ingras’s mastery of design and form. Flandrin’s Christ strikes me as more justly conceived than Scheffer’s. It is the Christ of the beloved disciple. In his designs illustrative of the Old Testament, Flandrin never is more than dignified, or grand after the fashion of academic grandeur. His Moses and Jehovah are fine senatorial figures. The figure of Job is the most realistic work of all. But Flandrin’s mind and sentiment were foreign to the rude and barbaric grandeur of the Hebrew stories. Yet by pure force of study and intellect he reached a very noble pictorial expression of many of the events of the Old Testament. Moses and the children of Israel led by the column of smoke by day, and Moses on the shore of the Red Sea, are very grand, though not grand in the way that Michael Angelo’s work is grand. You must respect the frescos illustrative of the Old Testament, you must be deeply moved by the beauty and piety of the designs of the New.

How intelligent is art patronage in France you may infer from the fact that the decoration of the church of Saint-Germain des Prés was given exclusively to a painter like Flandrin. By giving the whole church into the hands of one painter, and one so distinguished by his piety and ability as Flandrin was, the French Catholics have avoided the mixed and often incongruous character of ordinary church decoration. The frescos of Saint Germain des Prés make a harmonious impression : they are the emanation of one genius, not of many. The variety and completeness of the decoration, the expressive and unique arrangement of the pictures, the beautiful use of gold as in the specimens of Byzantine art, make it the most strange and attractive church in Paris. An hour spent in it would give you a most vivid appreciation of the grand and beautiful types of Judaism and Christianity. You could please your eye with a classic illustration of the sacred stories of your faith. The noble, radiant, and sad figures of prophets, priests, and kings; the august figure of Christ; the adoring and lovely Virgin, — such an array of figures evoke ideas that had no existence among the carved and painted gods and goddesses of Greece. The pale and patient Jesus seems more mighty than the calm and beautiful Olympian god. Flandrin has done more than make pictures of virgins and saints ; he has illustrated the whole Christian mythology, and given it an epic being in the painters’ world. It is no longer a Madonna here, a Saviour there, an apostolic group here, a prophet there ; but, brought under one roof, bound together in a harmonious ensemble, the whole procession of Biblical events is placed visibly before us with the science of a thorough artist and the sincerity of a truly believing mind.

Flandrin was celebrated as a portraitpainter, the peer of Ingres, but for him unrivalled in that department of art. His portrait of Napoléon Législateur is one of the most remarkable examples of modern portait-painting. Flandrin also decorated the church of SaintVincent de Paul, and made thirty-six decorative figures for the château of the Duc de Luynes, at Dampierre. He was a native of Lyons, born in 1809 ; at Paris, he was the favorite pupil of Ingres, whose example he closely followed ; he was less vigorous but more tender, less in his sense of beauty, but a better composer, and having more invention ; he made works that are individual and complete, with all the charm that art can have without opulence of color and splendor of imagination. Flandrin’s letters are said to express the piety and sweetness which please us in Eugénie de Guerin’s. His life was withdrawn from all vulgar and exciting things ; he was devoted to the ideal, and he habitually contemplated exalted and spiritual things. He has peopled the walls of churches with grand and benign figures, and he seems to have shared the experience of the saints that he painted. He was a great religous artist ; he has done for the moral and spiritual side of the life of man what the Greek sculptors and Italian masters did for the physical and sensual side of the life of man. He was an idealist and an artist, as distinguished from a realist and a naturalistic painter. In his portraits only he adopted the realistic manner and painted with an intense and thorough purpose, following the example of Leonardo da Vinci and Ingres. But in his religious subjects everything is lifted out of the domain of realistic art, and, in color, even out of naturalistic art. Not one of his frescos represents the natural colors of natural things. It is true that he makes skyblue, and ground ochre gray, and trees green ; but the pitch of color is determined by his own arbitrary will. Not once does he try to get the quality or texture or tone of nature, which all the great colorists have tried to get. A shallow critic writing for an ignorant public could plausibly depreciate Flandrin in view of this fact ; but in France, art and its correspondence with nature is so well understood that no one has had the effrontery to exclude him from the list of great artists because he had an arbitrary and unnatural but expressive system of color. Hippolyte Flandrin will always hold a supreme place among great religious artists, because of his mastery of expression, of composition, of form, and because of the unfailing dignity, sincerity, and elevation of his sentiment.

Eugene Benson.