Parallels
Michael Podro
Romanticism Hugh Honour (Penguin Books £8.50) Hugh Honour's Romanticism is a superb account of the art of the first half of the 19th century. The immense richness of his reading never troubles the directness and clarity of his criticism. When you want further material it is there, in very well organised notes. Art historians of the period are subject to three kinds of blindness: they derive from trying to see the first half of the 19th century as striving toward modern art, or from seeing it as a variation on 18th-century neo-classicism, or from national insularity — most often French. Honour avoids all these: we are treated to a marvellous sense of mobility as we read the juxtaposed remarks of such dissimilar -men as John Constable and Heinrich Heine on the subject of Gothic revival architecture, as we move from Potsdam to Regents Park, from Schinkel's fantasies to Pugin's.
The book starts by describing three paintings from about 1810, and this juxtaposition opens up the imaginative space of the book. The first is Caspar David Friedrich's 'Cross in the Mountains'. The painting with its meticulousness, is a strange study of isolation. It treats the symbolism of the cross in a way which escapes allegory or theological doctrine while being intensely religious.
Friedrich's own comments, as Honour remarks, give us no programme: The old world — the time when God the Father moved directly on the earth — died with the teaching of Jesus. The sun sank and the earth was no longer able to comprehend the departing light.
There were strange ambiguities in Friedrich's view of Christianity. with the coming of which the world seemed to lose its light.
The temper and technique of Friedrich is set in contrast to that of Turner's mountain landscapes of an avalanche and of Hannibal's army crossing the Alps. In these Honour sees 'a disturbing insight into the futility of heroism in the face of history as well as nature'. Characteristically, he does not press the similarity or dissimilarity with Friedrich. He leaves the reader with suggestions. Later in the book a parallel between Turner and Shelley is offered and Honour quotes a passage of the 'Daemon of the World'. including the lines: Thou must have marked the billowy mountain clouds, Edged with intolerable radiancy. Towering like rocks of jet Above the burning deep . . . He then remarks, 'But whereas Shelley longed to penetrate "the painted veil . . . called life" and to be absorbed in the white radiance of eternity, Turner's concern is with the veil itself?And we are left to think about it.
The third painting of the initial juxtaposition is Baron Gros's 'Napoleon on the Battlefield of Eylau', where Napoleon revisits the field with its dead and dying, and says: 'if all the kings of the world could contemplate such a spectacle, the world would be less avid for wars and conquests'. This did not, as Honour remarks, imply the least self-criticism. He places the painting in an interesting relation to Turner's Hannibal with its anti-heroisms and its implicit comment on Napoleon's crossing the Alps.
Throughout, Honour addresses himself to particular paintings, works of sculpture, buildings and prints. No general thesis is thrust between us and the works themselves, but themes are developed by the tact of contrast and parallel, and by the pertinence of literary and philosophical quotation.
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