Two: George Turnbull (1698–1748)

George Turnbull was born in Alloa, near Stirling, the son of a minister. He enrolled at the University of Edinburgh at the then not uncommonly young age of 13, but various diversions kept him from completing his degree until ten years later. During these years in Edinburgh, Turnbull was a member of the Rankenian Club, founded in 1716 by a group of young students, many of whom became in due course leading figures in the Scottish enlightenment. After graduating from Edinburgh in 1721, Turnbull took up the post of Regent at Marischal College in Aberdeen where he became a leading intellectual force and important educator of the philosophers who founded the Scottish common sense school of thought. His interest in the moral philosophy of Shaftesbury and the natural philosophy of Newton had a profound effect upon the Aberdeen curriculum, and he became one of the first to employ the experimental method in moral philosophy, an approach most famously associated with Hume.

Despite his prominence in Aberdeen, Turnbull fell out with the Principal of Marischal College, and resigned his post in 1727. His reputation for learning however was sufficient to enable him to be regularly employed as the tutor and guardian to young aristocrats on their continental grand tours. This latter experience, together with his continued study of moral and natural philosophy, profoundly influenced his intellectual development, and in particular the contents of his significant publications—all of which appeared in the early 1740s soon after his ordination as an Anglican minister.

A Treatise on Ancient Painting, more than any of his other works, reflects his experience accompanying young men on the grand tour. Turnbull is not interested in the study of art for its own sake, but as a means to moral education and improvement. Much of the work consists of surveys of the work of the great inheritors of the classical tradition in painting, from Raphael and Michelangelo through Poussin, but in several places he reflects upon the moral importance of the study of great art and it is from these sections that the following passage is drawn. He argues that the works of art encountered on the grand tour play a role in shaping moral character and sensibility, and thus have a role in education analogous to the experiment in the natural sciences.

Strictly speaking, Turnbull was not really an innovator in Scottish aesthetics, since he treats of art as a means to moral education, rather than attempting an analysis of the experience of art and beauty. But his Treatise on Ancient Painting, with its closely drawn analogies between the study of art and science, had a profound and wide influence upon Scottish enlightenment thought. In particular, the connection Turnbull develops between the development of moral character and the development of the faculty of taste is a theme continually returned to by philosophers throughout the Scottish enlightenment.

Further Reading

Alexander Broadie, ‘Art and Aesthetic Theory’, in Broadie, (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Reading II: A Treatise on Ancient Painting

[1]

There are subjects of a more important nature than paintings and sculptures, in whatever light they are considered, that ought principally to employ the thoughts of a traveller, who has it in his view to qualify himself for the service of his own country by visiting foreign ones. But one point aimed at in this Treatise is to show how mean, insipid and trifling the fine arts are when they are quite alienated from their better and nobler, genuine purposes which, as well as those of their sister poetry, are truly philosophical and moral; that is, to convey in an agreeable manner into the mind the knowledge of men and things; or to instruct us in morality, virtue and human nature. And it necessarily follows that the chief design of travelling must be somewhat of greater moment that barely to learn how to distinguish an original medal from a counterfeit one, a Greek from a Roman statue, or one painter’s hand from another’s; since it is here proved that even with regard to the arts of design that kind of knowledge is but idle and trivial; and that by it alone one has no better title to the character of a person of good taste in them, than a mere verbal critic has to that of a polite scholar in the classics.

Let us consider a little the pretended reasons for sending your gentleman to travel. They may be reduced to these two: ‘That they may see the remains of ancient arts, and the best productions of modern sculptors and painters’ and ‘That they may see the world and study mankind.’

Now as for the first, how it should be offered as a reason for sending young gentlemen abroad is indeed very unaccountable when one considers upon what footing education is amongst us at present; unless it could be thought that one may be jolted by an Italian chaise into the knowledge and taste that are evidently prerequisite to travelling with advantage, even in that view; or that such intelligence is the necessary mechanical effect of a certain climate upon the understanding, and will be instantaneously infused into one at his arrival on the classic ground. For in our present method of educating young gentlemen either in public schools or by private tutors, what is done that can in any degree prepare them for making proper and useful reflections upon the fine arts and their performances? Are not the arts of design quite severed in modern education not only from philosophy, their connection with which is not so obvious, or at least so generally acknowledged; but likewise from classical studies, where not only their usefulness must be readily owned by all who have the slightest notion of them, but where the want of proper help from ancient statues, bas-reliefs and paintings for understanding ancient authors, the poets in particular, is daily felt by teachers and students. It is not more ridiculous to dream of one’s acquiring a strange language merely by sucking in foreign air, than to imagine that those who have never been directed at home into the right manner of considering the fine arts; those who have no idea of their true beauty, scope and excellence (not to mention such as have not the least notion of drawing) that such should all at once so soon as they tread Italian soil become immediately capable of understanding these arts, and of making just reflections upon their excellent productions. And yet this is plainly the case with regard to the greater part of our young travellers. And for that reason I have endeavoured in the following essay to lead young gentlemen and those concerned in their education, into a juster notion of the fine arts than is commonly entertained even by the plurality of their professed admirers; by distinguishing the fine taste of them from the false learning that too frequently passes for it; and by showing in what respects alone the study of them belongs to gentlemen, whose high birth and fortune call them to the most important of all studies, that of men, manners and things, or virtue and public good.

The ancients considered education in a very extensive view, as comprehending all the arts and sciences, and employing them all to this one end: to form at the same time the head and the heart, the sense and the imagination, reason and the temper, that the whole man might be made truly virtuous and rational. And how they managed it, or thought it ought to be managed, to gain this noble scope, we may learn from their way of handling any one of the arts or discoursing on morals. Whatever is the more immediate subject of their inquiries, we find them as it has been observed, calling upon all of the arts and sciences for its embellishment and illustration. Let us therefore consider a little the natural union and close dependence of the liberal arts, and enquire how these were explained by the ancients...

If pictures of natural beauties are exact copies of some particular parts of nature, or done after them, as they really happened in nature, they are in that case no more than such appearances more accurately preserved by copies of them, than they can be by imagination and memory, in order to their being contemplated and examined as frequently and seriously as we please. It is the same as preserving fine thoughts and sentiments by writing, without trusting to memory, that they may not be lost. This is certainly too evident to be insisted upon. On the other hand, if landscapes are not copied from any particular appearances in nature, but imaginary; yet if they are conformable to nature’s appearances and laws, being composed by combining together such scattered beauties of nature as make a beautiful whole; even in this case, the study of pictures is still the study of nature itself. For if the composition be agreeable to nature’s settled laws and proportions, it may exist, and all such representations show what nature’s laws would produce in supposed circumstances. The former sort may therefore be called a register of nature, and the latter a supplement to nature, or rather to the observers and lovers of nature. And in both cases landscapes are samples or experiments in natural philosophy, because they serve to fix before our eyes beautiful effects of nature’s laws until we have admired them and accurately considered the laws from which such visible beauties and harmonies result.

Though one be as yet altogether unacquainted with landscapes (by which I would all along be understood to mean views and prospects of nature) he may easily comprehend what superior pleasures one must have, who has an eye formed by comparing landscapes with nature in the contemplation of nature itself, in his morning or evening walks, to one who is not at all conversant in painting. Such a one will be more attentive to nature; he will let nothing escape his observation because he will feel a vast pleasure in observing and choosing picturesque skies, scenes and other appearances that would be really beautiful in pictures. He will delight in observing what is really worthy of being painted, what circumstances a good genius would take hold of, what parts he would leave out, and what he would add, and for what reasons. The laws of light and colours, which properly speaking, produce all the various phenomena of the visible world, would afford to such an inexhaustible fund of the most agreeable entertainment; while the ordinary spectator of nature can hardly receive any satisfaction from his eye, but what may be justly compared with the ordinary titillation a common ear feels in respect of the exquisite joy a refined piece of music gives to a skilful, well-formed one, to a person instructed in the principles of true composition and inured to good performance.

Nor is another pleasure to be passed by unmentioned, that the eye formed by right instruction in good pictures, to the accurate and careful observance of nature’s beauties, will have in recalling to mind, upon seeing certain appearances in nature, the landscapes of great masters he has seen, and their particular genius’s and tastes. He will ever be discerning something suited to the particular turn of one or other of them; something a Titian, a Poussin, a Salvator Rosa, or a Claude Lorrain has already represented, or would not have let go without imitating, and making a good use of in landscape. Nature would send such a one to pictures, and pictures would send him to nature. And thus the satisfaction he would receive from the one or the other would be always double.

In short, pictures which represent visible beauties, or the effects of nature in the visible world, by the different modifications of light and colours, in consequence of the laws which relate to light, are samples of what these laws do or may produce. And therefore they are as proper samples or experiments to help and assist us in the study of those laws, as any samples or experiments are in the study of the laws of gravity, elasticity, or of any other quality in the natural world. They are then samples or experiments in natural philosophy. The same observation may be thus set in another light. Nature has given us a sense of beauty and order in visible objects, and it has not certainly given us this or any other sense for any other reason but that it might be improved by due culture and exercise. Now in what can the improvement of this sense and taste consist, but in being able to choose from nature such parts as being combined together according to nature’s laws, would make beautiful systems? This is certainly its proper business and entertainment, and what else is this but painting or a taste in painting? For painting aims at visible harmony, as music at harmony of sounds. But how else can either the eye or the ear, the sense of visible or audible harmony, be formed and improved to perfection, but by exercise and instruction about these harmonies, by means of proper examples? Pictures, therefore, in whatever sense they are considered have a near relation to philosophy, and a very close connection with education, if it be any part of its design to form our taste of nature, and improve our senses of visible harmonies and beauties, or to make us intelligent spectators and admirers of the visible world.

But I proceed to consider historical or moral pictures, which must immediately be acknowledged, in consequence of the very definition of them, to be proper samples and experiments in teaching human nature and moral philosophy. For what are historical pictures but imitations of parts of human life, representations of characters and manners? And are not such representations samples or specimens in moral philosophy by which any part of human nature or of the moral world may be brought near to our view, and fixed before us until it is fully compared with nature itself, and is found to be a true image and consequently to point out some moral conclusion with complete force of evidence? Moral characters and actions described by the good poet are readily owned to be very proper subjects for the philosopher to examine and compare with the human heart and the real springs and consequences of actions ... But moral pictures must be for the same reason proper samples in the school of morals. For what passions or actions may not be represented by pictures; what degrees, tones or blendings of affections; what frailties, what penances, what emotions in our hearts; what manners, or what characters cannot the pencil exhibit to the life? Moral pictures as well as moral poems are indeed mirrors in which we may view our inward features, gestures, airs and attitudes; but do not these, by a universal language, mark the different affections and dispositions of the mind? What character, what passions, what movement of the soul, may not be thus most powerfully expressed by a skilful hand? The design of moral pictures is, therefore, by that means, to show us to ourselves; to reflect our image upon us in order to attract our attention the more closely to it, and to engage us in conversation with ourselves, and an accurate consideration of our make and frame.

As it has been observed, with respect to landscapes, so in this case likewise. Pictures may bring parts of nature to our view which could never have been seen or observed by us in real life, and they must engage our attention more closely to nature itself than mere lessons upon nature can do without such assistance, nothing being so proper to fix the mind as the double employment of comparing copies with originals. And in general, all that has been said to show that landscapes are proper samples or experiments in natural philosophy, as being either registers or supplements to nature, is obviously applicable to moral pictures with relation to moral philosophy. We have already had occasion to remark that it is because the poet and painter have this advantage, that whereas the historian is confined to fact, they can select such circumstances in their representations as are fittest to instruct or move; that it is for this reason Aristotle recommends these arts as better teachers of morals than the best histories, and calls them the more catholic or universal. I shall only add upon this head that as certain delicate vessels in the human body cannot be discerned by the naked eye, but must be magnified in order to be rendered visible, so without the help of magnifiers, not only several nice parts of our moral fabric would escape our observation, but no features, no characters of whatever kind would be sufficiently attended to. Now the imitative arts become magnifiers in the moral way by means of choosing those circumstances which are most proper to exhibit the workings and consequences of affections in the strongest light that may be, or to render them most striking and conspicuous. All is nature that is represented, if all be agreeable to nature; what is not so, whether in painting or poetry, will be rejected even by every common beholder ... But a fiction that is consonant to nature may convey a moral lesson more strikingly than can be done by any real story, and is as sure a foundation to build a conclusion upon, since from what is conformable to nature, no erroneous or seductive rule can be inferred.

Thus, therefore, it is evident that pictures as well as poems have a very near relation to philosophy and a very close connection with moral instruction and education ... The conclusion I have now chiefly in view is that good moral paintings, whether by words or by the pencil, are proper samples in moral philosophy, and ought therefore to be employed in teaching it, for the same reason that experiments are made use of in teaching natural philosophy. And this is as certain as that experiments or samples of manners, affections, actions, and characters must belong to moral philosophy, and be proper samples for evincing and enforcing its doctrines—for such are moral paintings.

1 From A Treatise on Ancient Painting (London, 1740).