zest for life in its diversity? including even, as he announced in the title of an essay, 'The Pleasure of Hating.' He relished, and was able to convey completely, the particular qualities of things?a passage of poetry, a painting, a natural prospect, or a well-directed blow in a prize fight. Despite the recurrent frustrations of his fifty-two years of existence, he was able to say, with his last breath, 'Well, I've had a happy life.'
On Gusto1
Gusto in art is power or passion defining any object. It is not so difficult to explain this term in what relates to expression (of which it may be said to be the highest degree) as in what relates to things without expression, to the natural appearances of objects, as mere color or form. In one sense, however, there is hardly any object entirely devoid of expression, without some character of power belonging to it, some precise association with pleasure or pain: and it is in giving this truth of character from the truth of feeling, whether in the highest or the lowest degree, but always in the highest degree of which the subject is capable, that gusto consists.
There is a gusto in the coloring of Titian.2 Not only do his heads seem to think?his bodies seem to feel. This is what the Italians mean by the morbidezza? of his flesh color. It seems sensitive and alive all over; not merely to have the look and texture of flesh, but the feeling in itself. For example, the limbs of his female figures have a luxurious softness and delicacy, which appears conscious of the pleasure of the beholder. As the objects themselves in nature would produce an impression on the sense, distinct from every other object, and having something divine in it, which the heart owns and the imagination consecrates, the objects in the picture preserve the same impression, absolute, unimpaired, stamped with all the truth of passion, the pride of the eye, and the charm of beauty. Rubens makes his flesh color like flowers; Albano's4 is like ivory; Titian's is like flesh, and like nothing else. It is as different from that of other painters, as the skin is from a piece of white or red drapery thrown over it. The blood circulates here and there, the blue veins just appear, the rest is distinguished throughout only by that sort of tingling sensation to the eye, which the body feels within itself. This is gusto. Vandyke's5 flesh color, though it has great truth and purity, wants gusto. It has
1. Hazlitt's essay, first published in 1816 in the December 21, 1817) he remarked regretfullyabout radical journal The Examiner, introduces one of a painting by Benjamin West that 'there is nothing his distinctive critical terms. In the 17th century to be intense upon; no women one feels mad to English writers had imported the Italian word kiss; no face swelling into reality.' gusto, meaning taste, to denote a spectator's artis-2. Tiziano Vecelli (ca. 1490-1576), greatest of the tic sensibility. Gusto also carried the sense (which 16th-century Venetian painters. remains primary today) of especially keen, zestful 3. Softness, delicacy. appreciation. Hazlitt expanded the meaning of the 4. Francesco Albani (1578?1660), Italian painter. term so that it described not only the responsive-Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Flemish painter, ness of the spectator to the work of art but also was the most important artist of his time in north- the essential features of the natural or human ern Europe. objects that the work depicted. Keats, greatly 5. Sir Anthony Vandyke (1599-1641), Flemish impressed by 'On Gusto,' illuminated the essay's portrait painter, who did some of his best-known discussion of the wide range of sensuous and emo-work at the English court of Charles I. tional responses evoked by art when (in a letter of
.
ON GUSTO / 539
not the internal character, the living principle in it. It is a smooth surface, not a warm, moving mass. It is painted without passion, with indifference. The hand only has been concerned. The impression slides off from the eye, and does not, like the tones of Titian's pencil,6 leave a sting behind it in the mind of the spectator. The eye does not acquire a taste or appetite for what it sees. In a word, gusto in painting is where the impression made on one sense excites by affinity those of another.
Michael Angelo's forms are full of gusto. They everywhere obtrude the sense of power upon the eye. His limbs convey an idea of muscular strength, of moral grandeur, and even of intellectual dignity: they are firm, commanding, broad, and massy, capable of executing with ease the determined purposes of the will. His faces have no other expression than his figures, conscious power and capacity. They appear only to think what they shall do, and to know that they can do it. This is what is meant by saying that his style is hard and masculine. It is the reverse of Correggio's,7 which is effeminate. That is, the gusto of Michael Angelo consists in expressing energy of will without proportionable sensibility, Correggio's in expressing exquisite sensibility without energy of will. In Correggio's faces as well as figures we see neither bones nor muscles, but then what a soul is there, full of sweetness and of grace?pure, playful, soft, angelical! There is sentiment enough in a hand painted by Correggio to set up a school of history painters. Whenever we look at the hands of Correggio's women or of Raphael's,8 we always wish to touch them.
Again, Titian's landscapes have a prodigious gusto, both in the coloring and forms. We shall never forget one that we saw many years ago in the Orleans Gallery of Acteon hunting.9 It had a brown, mellow, autumnal look. The sky was of the color of stone. The winds seemed to sing through the rustling branches of the trees, and already you might hear the twanging of bows resound through the tangled mazes of the wood. Mr. West,1 we understand, has this landscape. He will know if this description of it is just. The landscape background of the St. Peter Martyr2 is another well known instance of the power of this great painter to give a romantic interest and an appropriate character to the objects of his pencil, where every circumstance adds to the effect of the scene?the bold trunks of the tall forest trees, the trailing ground plants, with that tall convent spire rising in the distance, amidst the blue sapphire mountains and the golden sky.
Rubens has a great deal of gusto in his Fauns and Satyrs, and in all that expresses motion, but in nothing else. Rembrandt has it in everything; everything in his pictures has a tangible character. If he puts a diamond in the ear of a burgomaster's wife, it is of the first water; and his furs and stuffs are proof against a Russian winter. Raphael's gusto was only in expression; he had no idea of the character of anything but the human form. The dryness and poverty of his style in other respects is a phenomenon in the art. His trees are like
6. In the archaic sense: a painter's brush. 7. Antonio Correggio (1494?1 534), Italian artist. 8. Rafaello Sanzio (1488-1520), one of the supreme painters of the high Italian Renaissance. 9. Titian's Diana and Actaeon, shown in a celebrated public exhibition (1798-99) of old Italian masters, most of them from the collection of the due d'Orleans. Following the duke's execution, English investors brought his collection to London from Revolutionary France to be auctioned off. In 'On the Pleasures of Painting' Hazlitt writes that for visitors to the Orleans Gallery it was as if 'Old Time had unlocked his treasures': 'From that time I lived in a world of pictures.'
1. Benjamin West (1738?1820) was an American- born painter of historical scenes who achieved a high reputation in England. 2. A celebrated altarpiece by Titian depicting the martyrdom of Peter, a 13th-century Dominican.
.
54 0 / WILLIAM HAZLITT
sprigs of grass stuck in a book of botanical specimens. Was it that Raphael never had time to go beyond the walls of Rome? That he was always in the streets, at church, or in the bath? He was not one of the Society of Arcadians.3
Claude's4 landscapes, perfect as they are, want gusto. This is not easy to explain. They are perfect abstractions of the visible images of things; they speak the visible language of nature truly. They resemble a mirror
