Upsetting the Balance: William Hogarth and Roger de Piles Bernd Krysmanski (This online essay is part of The Site for Research on William Hogarth. It was originally accepted for publication in the Burlington Magazine. However, the approval given by the editorial board in 1997 was later withdrawn because aspects of the paper's content had been dealt with a year earlier in the author's German PhD thesis.)
In William Hogarth's Enthusiasm Delineated (1761)
Other puppets dangle unused on the pulpit. They call to mind distorted versions of Old Master biblical figures. On the left we recognise the Adam and Eve from Dürer's The Fall of Man (1504) in the shape of jointed manikins.
One cannot help but feel that these figures are being mocked. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, Hogarth's contemporaries would have seen at once that these burlesque puppets were ridiculing "high" religious art by representing biblical motifs in the "low" Dutch manner. What seems to have gone unnoticed to the present day, however, is that the preacher's two arms form the beam of a scales on which the puppets, representing not only heaven and hell, but classic and baroque art as well, are being "weighed" against each other. All the puppets in this print appear to be waiting to be weighed on these "scales of judgement", to be judged for right and (more likely) wrong.
What could Hogarth's reason have been for using the traditional, but, in Enthusiasm Delineated, hidden, symbol of weighing right against wrong? In my opinion he is alluding ironically to Roger de Piles's notorious Balance des Peintres, the "hit parade" guide for eighteenth century self-styled connoisseurs of painting, which had been published as an appendix to the Cours de Peinture par Principes in Paris in 1708. This Balance rated Renaissance and Baroque painters according to a point system based on four academic classifications: "Composition", "Dessein", "Coloris" and "Expression".
De Piles's method of assessment led the connoisseur to believe that the strengths and weaknesses of a great master could be defined, and measured. The maximum score in any category, though unattainable for human beings, was 20. The highest possible degree of perfection was 19 which, however, according to the author, no artist had ever achieved.
Seen in this light, it is certainly no coincidence that the preacher in Enthusiasm Delineated, standing in his pulpit high above the low audience, is weighing copies of works by the de Piles favourites. The fact that ironic copies of works of these painters hang at equilibrium hints at the late seventeenth-century debate at the Paris academy between the "Poussinistes" (i.e. classicists who, like Raphael and Poussin, stressed correct outlines in painting) and the "Rubénistes" (i.e. the followers of Rubens who insisted that colour was as important as drawing).
Four of the unused puppets dangling from the pulpit also refer to painters named in the Balance des Peintres. With 17 points for colour and a total of 50 placing him well ahead of both Giulio Romano and Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt ranks relatively high on de Piles's list. Nevertheless, he lags so far behind Raphael and Rubens that his Peter is rightly placed not in the preacher's hand but one level lower on the pulpit's central panel next to his companion Paul. That Rembrandt did so badly was due to his receiving only 6 points for drawing, a fairly low score as Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn (1712-1780) points out in his otherwise more positive account of Rembrandt's art.
Michelangelo doesn't do much better. In de Piles's system he receives 8 points for composition and expression, 17 for drawing and 4 for colour. His total of 37 places him eighteenth, one point ahead of Dürer. Admittedly, Hogarth's source in Enthusiasm Delineated is not Michelangelo the painter, as in de Piles's Balance; but Michelangelo the sculptor. The horns and beard of the marionette Moses allude to the famous statue for the tomb of Pope Julius II, a well-chosen object of ridicule, as it had been attacked by contemporary English critics. Jonathan Richardson, for instance, in his very popular guidebook for connoisseurs, stated that Michelangelo's Moses
"has so much the Air of a goat, that either Mich. Angelo intended it, (which he was as likely to be Guilty of as any Man) or he Mistook his Air, and instead of raising it to the top of Human nature as he ought, has sunk it towards Brutality."
The preacher in Enthusiasm Delineated is not preaching the word of God but judging works of "high" art. To make this evident and to cause the viewer to think of de Piles's Balance, the hand-written notes of the British Museum impression include, bottom left, a sketch labelled "the Scales". This is indeed a most striking argument that Hogarth did have de Piles in mind when he executed his print.
It is "high" art that swings from the preacher's outstretched hands, but, as depicted here, Raphael's God and Rubens's Devil would hardly please the connoisseur. They are grotesque puppets that look more like rogues swinging on the gallows than biblical figures. In this light, perhaps it is not just by chance that the symbol of the Trinity which God holds in his right hand looks like a reduced version of the famous triple gallows at Tyburn which Hogarth eternalised in plate 11 of his series Industry and Idleness (1747).
Hogarth was no friend of the French, or any, traditional academy
It is fitting that measuring is an important theme throughout Hogarth's print. On the right of the print, for example, there is a mental thermometer which records the congregation's state of enthusiasm or insanity and indicates the various manifestations of an art lover's mad craving to possess an Old Master painting. Near the pulpit we find the preacher's "Scale of Vociferation", which culminates in "Bull Roar" and the cry "Chroist Blood Blood Blood". This not only alludes to George Whitefield's loud voice and powerful sermons,
Eighteenth-century criticism dealt intensively with the Balance des Peintres. In England, Jonathan Richardson, in his Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715, 2nd ed. 1725), expressed a positive opinion of de Piles's method, but enlarged the basis of assessment by introducing three further categories: "Invention", "Handling" and "Grace and Greatness".
The Balance was well known among poets in eighteenth-century England. This is indicated by Mark Akenside's "Ballance [sic] of Poets" published in Robert Dodsley's Museum, II, no. 19 (6 December, 1746). De Piles's method also influenced some passages in Joseph Spence's Crito, or, A Dialogue on Beauty (1752), published under the pseudonym of Sir Harry Beaumont. Crito endeavours to set down a hierarchy of the factors which cause beauty, exemplified by the different beauty of female figures. According to Spence's system, the highest score for colour was 10, for form 20, expression 30 and grace 40 points. It is interesting to note that Spence's system was criticised by Hogarth's friend, Allan Ramsay, in his Dialogue on Taste which was published in The Investigator, Number 322, in 1755.
In France, the Abbé Jean Baptiste DuBos, in his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719), commends de Piles's Balance, though he regrets that there is no distinction between a "composition pittoresque" and a "composition poétique".
The absurd results of this scientifically "improved" de Piles system were an indication of the extremes to which art connoisseurship was prepared to go in its "appreciation" of the Old Masters. It can only have seemed ludicrous to an English artist like Hogarth and it is not surprising that he would ridicule it. From the mid-eighteenth-century on, English satirists, fighting against the all too strict rules of art, were attacking de Piles's (and Richardson's revised) Balance. In Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759), for instance, Shandy assesses the stylistic qualities of the dedication in a book according to criteria normally applicable only to painters:
Hogarth more than once used the motif of scales in satirical contexts. His early Benefit Ticket for Spiller (1720?)
Scales can also be found in anti-Hogarth caricatures. In Paul Sandby's Burlesque sur le Burlesque (1754)
Little surprise, then, if in Enthusiasm Delineated, Hogarth is picking up on the scales motif and relating it ironically to the "high" (mostly religious) art so idolised in England by despicable "Connoisseurs". How appropriate that Hogarth should turn their own nonsensical scale of values against them in satire! This print is probably the first criticism of de Piles's Balance des Peintres to come from a painter, who, as a painter, felt the need to preserve his own integrity as a visual artist. It is certainly the first, if not the only, criticism to be expressed entirely on a painter's terms. The attack here is not verbal, but purely visual. How many points would Hogarth score?
Notes
[1] See RONALD PAULSON, Hogarth's Graphic Works, third, revised edition, London, 1989, no. 210. See also the good reproduction in PAULSON, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, New Haven and London, 1971, II, pl. 284. For a more detailed discussion, see BERND W. KRYSMANSKI, Hogarth's 'Enthusiasm Delineated': Nachahmung als Kritik am Kennertum, 2 vols., Hildesheim, Zurich, New York, 1996. The English reader may also consult my essay "We see a Ghost: Hogarth's Satire on Methodists and Connoisseurs", Art Bulletin, 80 (June 1998), 292-310, including some new research.
[2] Raphael, God appears to Noah (Noah's thanksgiving after the flood; 1511) above the Repulse of Attila. For the ceiling frescoes in the Vatican Stanza d'Eliodoro, see DEOCLECIO REDIG DE CAMPOS, Raffaello nelle Stanze, Milan 1965, Tav. 65; JÖRG TRAEGER, "Raffaels Stanza d'Eliodoro und ihr Bildprogramm," Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 13, 1971, especially pp. 90-94; SYLVIA FERINO-PAGDEN/MARIA ANTONIETTA ZANCAN, Raffaello: Catalogo completo dei dipinti, Florence, 1989, p. 101; SYLVIA FERINO-PAGDEN, "Raphael's Heliodorus vault and Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling: an old controversy and a new drawing," Burlington Magazine, 132 (1990), pp. 195-204 (particularly on Noah's thanksgiving after the flood); MICHAEL ROHLMANN, " 'Dominus mihi adiutor': Zu Raffaels Ausmalung der Stanza d'Eliodoro unter den Päpsten Julius II. und Leo X.," Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 59 (1996), fig. 15.
[3] There are two proofs of this print. The quotation above is handwritten by Hogarth on the bottom left of the British Museum impression. See also PAULSON, Hogarth's Graphic Works, op.cit. at note 1 above, p. 175. On the other proof, now kept in the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the letters "A, B ..." are also handwritten on the figures they refer to. In spite of this very clear reference to Rubens, I have not been able to discover the actual "model" for the devil Hogarth claims to have borrowed from him.
[4] On Dürer's famous print, see ERWIN PANOFSKY, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, ed. Princeton, 1971, pp. 84-87 and fig. 117; Albrecht Dürer, Master Printmaker, Department of Prints & Drawings, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass., 1971, nos. 84-85.
[5] In the handwritten notes on the British Museum impression, Hogarth emphasises that figure "C" has been borrowed "from Rembrant". See PAULSON, Hogarth's Graphic Works, op.cit. at note 1 above, p. 175. For Rembrandt's etching, see LUDWIG MÜNZ, A Critical Catalogue of Rembrandt's Etchings, 2 vols., London, 1952, no. 239. The "imitations of Several other Painters" Hogarth mentions in the notes on the San Francisco proof are not named.
[6] See CHARLES DE TOLNAY, Michelangelo, iv, Princeton, 1954, pls. 18-27, pp. 281-284; CLAUDIA ECHINGER-MAURACH, Studien zu Michelangelos Juliusgrabmal, 2 vols., Hildesheim, Zurich, New York, 1991, II, figs. 99-101.
[7] See ROGER DE PILES, Cours de Peinture par Principes, Paris, 1708, pp. 489-498. An English translation, The Principles of Painting, appeared in 1743. On DE PILES'S Balance, see CLÉMENT DE RIS, "La Balance des Peintres par Roger de Piles," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 25 (1882), pp. 569-571; SEYMOUR SLIVE, Rembrandt and His Critics, The Hague, 1953, pp. 127-128, 132-133, 148-149, 219-221; JOHN STEEGMAN, "The Balance des Peintres of Roger de Piles," The Art Quarterly, 17 (1954), pp. 255-261; SUSANNE HEILAND, "La Balance des Peintres," in Festschrift Johannes Jahn zum XXII. November MCMLVII, Leipzig, 1958, pp. 237-245; SARAH G. BRADFORD, 'Roger de Piles as Critic and the Balance des Peintres,' PhD thesis, New York, 1959; BERNARD TEYSSÈDRE, L'Histoire de l'Art vue du Grand Siècle, Paris, 1964, pp. 171 ff.; W. GERALD STUDDERT-KENNEDY / MICHAEL DAVENPORT, "The Balance of Roger de Piles: A Statistical Analysis," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 32, 1974, pp. 493-502; NORMAN BRYSON, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 58-60; IRENE HABERLAND, Jonathan Richardson (1666-1745): Die Begründung der Kunstkennerschaft, Münster and Hamburg, 1991, pp. 116-117, 123-126; SVETLANA ALPERS, "Roger de Piles and the History of Art," in PETER GANZ / MARTIN GOSEBRUCH / NIKOLAUS MEYER / MARTIN WARNCKE (eds.), Kunst und Kunsttheorie 1400-1900, Wiesbaden, 1991, 175-88 (Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, vol. 48); ANDREW MCCLELLAN, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in 18th Century Paris, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 33-35; MARTIN ROSENBERG, Raphael and France: The Artist as Paradigm and Symbol, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, pp. 55-56; FRANÇOIS MAIRESSE, "Réflexion sur la balance des peintres de Roger de Piles (1635-1709)", Recherches Poïétiques, 8 (1998/99), 42-49; VICTOR A. GINSBURGH / SHEILA WEYERS, "On the contemporaneity of Roger de Piles' Balance des Peintres" (2008). For some brief remarks on the French Academy and de Piles's Balance, see also CHRISTOPHER L.C.E. WITCOMBE, "Art & Artists and the Academies". For English eighteenth-century writers praising or satirising the Balance des Peintres, see BERND KRYSMANSKI, "William Hogarths Kritik an der Balance des Peintres: Roger de Piles, Jonathan Richardson, Mark Akenside und Joseph Spence im Fadenkreuz der englischen Satire," in JOACHIM MÖLLER (ed.), Sister Arts: Englische Literatur im Grenzland der Kunstgebiete, Marburg, 2001, pp. 51-75.
[8] See DE PILES, op.cit. at note 7 above, p. 490.
[9] Rubens has a high score in "Composition" (18 points) and "Coloris" and "Expression" (17 points each), but falls behind in "Dessin", with only 13 points. Raphael's weak point is colour, with a meagre 12 points. In composition he achieves "only" 17 points, a whole point less than Rubens! This shows how highly the avowed Rubéniste de Piles esteems his model.
[10] All other painters score less in de Piles's ratings. Second place is shared by the Carracci and Domenichino, with 58 points each. Charles Le Brun follows third with a count of 56. Correggio and Poussin share position five with 53 points each. That Poussin does not rank higher is due to his colour, which earns him no more than 6. Also worth mentioning is de Piles's zero rating for Caravaggio's hopeless "Expression" and his pitiful total score of 28. Caravaggio, often accused by academicians of a too vivid, even ugly realism, thus comes third to last at position twenty-three. Cf. the table in STEEGMAN, "The Balance des Peintres of Roger de Piles," op.cit. at note 7 above, p. 258, although he gets his sums wrong for Le Brun's score.
[11] See BERNARD TEYSSÈDRE, Roger de Piles et les débats sur le coloris au siècle de Louis XIV, Paris, 1957; ROSENBERG, op.cit. at note 7 above, pp. 53-60.
[12] See CHRISTIAN LUDWIG VON HAGEDORN, Lettre à un amateur de la peinture, avec des eclaircissements historiques sur un cabinet, et les auteurs des tableaux qui le composent, Dresden, 1755, p. 67.
[13] See WILLIAM HOGARTH, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. JOSEPH BURKE, Oxford, 1955, p. 9; ed. RONALD PAULSON, New Haven and London, 1997, p. 5. See also Hogarth's rejected passages to his book, cited in BURKE's edition of The Analysis of Beauty, p. 169. Hogarth's knowledge of Dürer's rules of proportion may derive from GIOVANNI PAOLO LOMAZZO'S Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Carvinge, Buildinge, ed. Richard Haydocke, Oxford, 1598, with which he was well familiar.
[14] JONATHAN RICHARDSON, Sen. and Jun., An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy, &c. with Remarks, London, 1722, p. 295.
[15] See PAULSON, Hogarth's Graphic Works, op.cit. at note 1 above, no. 178.
[16] See TEYSSÈDRE, op.cit. at note 11 above.
[17] In his manuscript, "Apology for Painters" (c. 1761), Hogarth wrote of the French academy: "Voltaire observes after that establishment no work of genious appeard for says he they all became imitators and mannerists." See MICHAEL KITSON, "Hogarth's 'Apology for Painters' ", Walpole Society, 41 (1966-68), p. 92. In his Analysis of Beauty, he likewise denigrated the French School: "indeed France hath not produced one remarkable good colourist." See HOGARTH, op.cit. at note 13 above, ed. BURKE, p. 132; ed. PAULSON, p. 93.
[18] On George Whitefield (1714-1770), the famous Methodist preacher, see ARNOLD A. DALLIMORE, George Whitefield: The Life and Times of the Great Evangelist of the Eighteenth-Century Revival, 2 vols., Edinburgh and Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1970-80; HARRY S. STOUT, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism, Grand Rapids, Mich., 1991.
[19] Referring to London picture auctions, Hogarth's friend Rouquet wrote, "The auctioneer mounts with a great deal of gravity, salutes the assembly, and prepares himself a little, like an orator, to perform his office with all the gracefulness and eloquence of which he is master." See ANDRÉ ROUQUET, The Present State of the Arts in England, London, 1755, p. 124.
[20] On eighteenth-century English appreciation of Rembrandt's Hundred Guilder Print, see ELLEN G. D'OENCH, "A Madness to have his Prints: Rembrandt and Georgian Taste, 1720-1800," in CHRISTOPHER WHITE / DAVID ALEXANDER / ELLEN D'OENCH, Rembrandt in Eighteenth Century England, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 1983, p. 71 and comment on no. 163.
[21] JONATHAN RICHARDSON, An Essay on the Theory of Painting, Second Edition, London, 1725, p. 37.
[22] JONATHAN RICHARDSON, Two Discourses, I. An Essay on the whole Art of Criticism as it relates to Painting, II. An Argument in behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur, London, 1719, I: p. 48.
[23] Ibid., p. 55. See also CAROL GIBSON-WOOD, "Jonathan Richardson and the Rationalization of Connoisseurship," Art History, 7, March 1984, pp. 44 ff.; HABERLAND, op.cit. at note 7 above, p. 134. On Richardson's theory of art, see also CAROL GIBSON-WOOD, Jonathan Richardson: Art Theorist of the English Enlightenment, New Haven and London, 2000. Richardson, however, did not wish to see his own system applied dogmatically, for he wrote, "If in a Picture the Story be well chosen, and finely Told (at least) if not Improv'd, if it fill the Mind with Noble, and Instructive Ideas, I will not scruple to say 'tis an excellent Picture, tho' the Drawing be as Incorrect as that of Corregio, Titian, or Rubens; the Colouring as Disagreeable as that of Polidore, Battista Franco, or Michael Angelo." See RICHARDSON, Two Discourses, op.cit. at note 22 above, I: pp. 13-14.
[24] See SIR HARRY BEAUMONT (pseud.), Crito, or, A Dialogue on Beauty, London, 1752, reviewed in The Monthly Review, VI (1752), pp. 226 ff. On Allan Ramsay's ridicule of Sir Harry Beaumont's method of comparing beauties "by multiplying the first by the second, and dividing by the third," which "will always be odious and ... absurd," see The Investigator, 322, London, 1755, pp. 30-32. On Akenside's "Ballance," Spence's Crito and Ramsay's critical response to it, see also KRYSMANSKI, "William Hogarths Kritik an der Balance des Peintres," op.cit. at note 7 above, pp. 61-65.
[25] JEAN BAPTISTE DUBOS, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, 5th ed., Paris, 1746, I: p. xxxi.
[26] JEAN JACQUES DORTOUS DE MAIRAN, "Remarques sur la Balance des Peintres de M. de Piles, telle qu'on la trouve à la fin de son Cours de Peinture," in Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences, Avec les Mémoires de Mathématique et de Physique, Année 1755, Paris, 1761, pp. 1 ff.
[27] LAURENCE STERNE, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, I, London, 1760, chapter ix.
[28] See PAULSON, Hogarth's Graphic Works, op.cit. at note 1 above, no. 2.
[29] See ibid., no. 180.
[30] See RONALD PAULSON, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, op.cit. at note 1 above, I: pl. 236; RONALD PAULSON, Hogarth, Volume 3: Art and Politics, 1750-1764, New Brunswick, 1993, fig. 26.
[31] ROUQUET, op.cit. at note 19 above, p. 17. CITATION If you cite this Web page, would you please use the following citation: Return to The Site for Research on William Hogarth.
By
The design, your Lordship sees, is good, the colouring transparent, - the drawing not amiss; - or to speak more like a man of science [a sideswipe at Richardson's "Science of a Connoisseur"], - and measure my piece in the painter's scale, divided into 20, - I believe, my Lord, the outlines will turn out at 12, - the composition as 9, - the colouring as 6, - the expression 13 and a half, - and the design, - if I may be allowed, my Lord, to understand my own design, and supposing absolute perfection in designing, to be as 20, - I think it cannot well fall short of 19.
[27]Every Englishman constantly holds a pair of scales, wherein he exactly weighs the birth, the rank, and especially the fortune of those he is in company with, in order to regulate his behaviour and discourse accordingly; and on this occasion the rich tradesman is always sure to outweigh the poor artist."
[31]
Bernd Krysmanski, "Upsetting the Balance: William Hogarth and Roger de Piles" (1997), The Site for Research on William Hogarth. Updated March 2023. <http://www.william-hogarth.de/balance.html>
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