Of unimaginative work, Bandinelli and Canova supply us with characteristic
instances of every kind, the Hercules and Cacus of the former, and its criticism by Cellini, will occur at once to every one; the
disgusting statue now placed so as to conceal Giotto's important tempera picture
in Santa Croce is a better instance, but a still more impressive lesson might be
received by comparing the inanity of Canova's garland grace, and ball-room
sentiment with the intense truth, tenderness, and power of men like Mino da
Fiesole, whose chisel leaves many a hard edge, and despises down and dimple, but
it seems to cut light and carve breath, the marble burns beneath it,
cheap oil paintings, and becomes
transparent with very spirit. Yet Mino stopped at the human nature; he saw the
soul, but not the ghostly presences about it; it was reserved for Michael Angelo
to pierce deeper yet, and to see the indwelling angels. No man's soul is alone:
Laocoon or Tobit, the serpent has it by the heart or the angel by the hand, the
light or the fear of the spiritual things that move beside it may be seen on the
body; and that bodily form with Buonaroti, white, solid, distinct material,
though it be, is invariably felt as the instrument or the habitation of some infinite, invisible power. The earth of the Sistine Adam that begins to burn;
the woman embodied burst of adoration from his sleep; the twelve great torrents
of the Spirit of God that pause above us there, urned in their vessels of clay;
the waiting in the shadow of futurity of those through whom the promise and
presence of God went down from the Eve to the Mary, each still and fixed, fixed
in his expectation, silent, foreseeing,
modern abstract oil painting, faithful, seated each on his stony
throne, the building stones of the word of God, building on and on, tier by
tier, to the Refused one, the head of the corner; not only these, not only the
troops of terror torn up from the earth by the four quartered winds of the
Judgment, but every fragment and atom of stone that he ever touched became
instantly inhabited by what makes the hair stand up and the words be few; the
St. Matthew, not yet disengaged from his sepulchre, bound hand and foot by his
grave clothes, it is left for us to loose him; the strange spectral wreath of
the Florence Pieta, casting its pyramidal, distorted shadow, full of pain and
death, among the faint purple lights that cross and perish under the obscure
dome of St
a. Maria del Fiore, the white lassitude of joyous limbs,
panther like, yet passive, fainting with their own delight, that gleam among the
Pagan formalisms of the Uffizii, far away, showing themselves in their lustrous
lightness as the waves of an Alpine torrent do by their dancing among the dead
[Page 186] stones, though the
stones be as white as they:and finally, and perhaps more than all,
those four ineffable types, not of darkness nor of day—not of morning nor
evening, but of the departure and the resurrection, the twilight and the dawn of
the souls of men—together with the spectre sitting in the shadow of the niche
above them; all these, and all else that I could name
of his forming, have borne, and in themselves retain and exercise the same
inexplicable power—inexplicable because proceeding from an imaginative
perception almost superhuman, which goes whither we cannot follow, and is where
we cannot come; throwing naked the final, deepest root of the being of man, whereby he grows out
of the invisible, and holds on his God home.
abstract oil paintings
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