he picture is the grief in
perfect sympathy with Iphigenia; the father would have been absorbed in
his own grief, and his grief would have been an unsympathetic grief
towards Iphigenia. It was his own case that he felt; and it does appear
to us an aggravation of the suffering of Iphigenia, that, at the moment
of her sacrifice, she saw indeed her father's person, but was never
more--and knew she was never more--to behold his face again. This
circumstance alone would justify Timanthes, but other concurrent reasons
may be given. It was no want of power to express the father's grief, for
it is in the province of art to express every such delineation; but
there _is_ a point of grief that is ill expressed by the countenance at
all; and there is a natural action in such cases for the sufferer
himself to hide his face, as if conscious that it was not in agreement
with his feelings. Such grief is astounding: we look for the expression
of it, and find it not: it is better than receive this shock to hide the
face. We do it naturally; so that here the art of the painter, that
required that his picture should be a whole, and centre in Iphigenia,
was mainly assisted by the proper adoption of this natural action of
Agamemnon. Mr Fuseli, whose criticism is always acute, and generally
just and true, has well discussed the subject, and properly commented
upon the flippancy of Falconet. After showing the many ways in which the
painter might have expressed the parent's grief, and that none of them
would be _decere, pro dignitate, digne_, he adds--'But Timanthes had too
true a sense of nature to expose a father's feelings, or to tear a
passion to rags; nor had the Greeks yet learned of Rome to steel the
face. If he made Agamemnon bear his calamity as a man, he made him also
feel it as a man. It became the leader of Greece to sanction the
ceremony with his presence: it did not become the father to see his
daughter beneath the dagger's point: the same nature that threw a real
mantle over the face of Timoleon, when he assisted at the punishment of
his brother, taught Timanthes to throw an imaginary one over the face of
Agamemnon; neither height nor depth, _propriety_ of expression was his
aim.' It is a question whether Timanthes took the idea from the text of
Euripides, or whether it is his invention, and was borrowed by the
dramatist. The picture must have presented a contrast to that of his
rival Parrhasius, which exhibited the fury of Ajax.