JUDITH.
Botticelli.
Meantime, pari passu, almost, a painter who was a poet was trying his
hand; a man who knew his Bible and his mythology and was equally at home with
either. Perhaps it is not extravagant to say that you cannot be an artist unless
you are at home with mythology, unless mythology is the swiftest and most direct
expression of your being, so that you can be measured by it as a man is known by
his books, or a woman by her clothes, her way of bowing, her amusements, or her
charities. For mythopœia is just this, the incarnating the spirit of natural
fact; and the generic name of that power is Art. A kind of creation, a clothing
of essence in matter, an hypostatizing (if you will have it) of an object of
intuition within the folds of an object of sense. Lessing did not dig so deep as
his Greek Voltaire (whose "dazzling antithesis," after all, touches the root of
the matter), for he did not see that rhythmic extension in time or space, as the
case may be, with all that that implies—colour,abstract oil paintings on canvas, value, proportion, all the
convincing incidents of form—is simply the mode of all arts, the thing with
which Art's substance must be interpenetrated, until the two form a whole,
lovely, golden, irresistible, and inevitable as Nature's pieces are. This
substance, as I have said, is the spirit of natural fact. And so mythology is
Art at its simplest and barest (where the bodily medium is neither word, nor
texture of stone, nor dye), the parent art from which all the others were, so to
speak, begotten by man's need. This much of explanation, I am sorry to say, is
necessary, before we turn to our mytho-poet of Florence, to see what he made out
of the story of Judith. where to buy oil paintingsBotticelli.
First of all, though, what has the story of Judith to do with mythology? It is a legend, one of the finest of Semitic legends; and between legend and myth there is as great a gulf as between Jew and Greek. I believe there are no myths proper to Israel—I do not see how such magnificent egoists could contract to the necessary state of awe—and I do not know that there are any legends proper to Greece which are divorced from real myths. For where a myth is the incarnation of the spirit of natural fact, a legend is the embellishment of an historical event: a very different thing. A natural fact is permanent and elemental, an historical event is transient and superficial. Take one instance out of a score. The rainbow links heaven and earth. Iris,reproduction oil paintings uk, then, to the myth-making Greek, was Jove's messenger, intermediary between God and Man. That is to incarnate a constant, natural fact. Plato afterwards, making her a daughter of Thaumas, incarnated a fact, psychological, but none the less constant, none the less natural. But, to say, as the legend-loving Jew said,that Noah floated his ark over a drowning world and secured for his posterity a standing covenant with God, who then and once for all set his bow in the heavens; that is to indicate, somewhere, in the dim backward and abysm of time, an historical event. The rainbow is suffered as the skirt of the robe of Noah, who was an ancestor of Israel. So the Judith poem may be a decorated event, or it may be the barest history in a splendid epical setting: the point to remember is that it cannot be, as legend, a subject for creative art. The artist, in the language of Neo-Platonism, is a demiurge; he only of men can convert dead things into life. And now we will go into the Uffizi. original oil paintings for sale
Mr. Ruskin, in his petulant-playful way, has touched upon the feeling of amaze most people have who look for the first time at Botticelli's Judith tripping smoothly and lightly over the hill-country, her steadfast maid dogging with intent patient eyes every step she takes. You say it is flippant, affected, pedantic. For answer, I refer you to the sage himself, who, from his point of view—that painting may fairly deal with a chapter of history—is perfectly right. The prevailing strain of the story is the strength of weakness—ex dulci fortitudo, to invert the old enigma. "O God, O my God, hear me also, a widow. Break down their stateliness by the hand of a woman!" It is the refrain that runs through the whole history of Israel, that reasonable complacency of a little people in their God-fraught destiny. And, withal, a streak of savage spite: that the audacious oppressor shall be done scornfully to death. There is the motive of Jael and Sisera too. So "she smote twice upon his neck with all her might, and she took away his head from him,large oil paintings for sale, and tumbled his body down from the bed." Ho! what a fate for the emissary of the Great King. Wherefore, once more, the jubilant paradox, "The Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a woman!" That is it: the amazing, thrilling antithesis insisted on over and over again by the old Hebrew bard. "Her sandals ravished his eyes, her beauty took his mind prisoner, and the fauchion passed through his neck." That is the leit-motif: Sandro the poet knew it perfectly well and taught it to the no small comfort of Mr. Ruskin and his men. Giuditta, dainty, blue-eyed, a girl still and three years a widow, flits homeward through a spring landscape of grey and green and the smile of a milky sky, being herself the dominant of the chord, with her bough of slipt olive and her jagged scimitar, with her pretty blue fal-lals smocked and puffed,modern oil paintings, and her yellow curls floating over her shoulders. On her slim feet are the sandals that ravished his eyes; all her maiden bravery is dancing and fluttering like harebells in the wind. Behind her plods the slave girl folded in an orange scarf, bearing that shapeless, nameless burden of hers, the head of the grim Lord Holofernes. Oh, for that, it is the legend itself! For look at the girl's eyes. What does their dreamy solemnity mean if not, "the Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a woman"? One other delicate bit of symbolizing he has allowed himself, which I may not omit. You are to see by whom this deed was done: by a woman who has unsexed herself. Judith is absorbed in her awful service; her robe trails on the ground and clings about her knees; she is unconscious of86the hindrance. The gates of Bethulia are in sight; the Chaldean horsemen are abroad, but she has no anxiety to escape. She is swift because her life just now courses swiftly; but there is no haste. The maid, you shall mark, picks up her skirts with careful hand, and steps out the more lustily for it. flower oil paintings on canvas
So far Botticelli the poet, and so far also Mr. Ruskin, reader of pictures. What says Botticelli the painter? Had he no instincts to tell him that his art could have little to say to a legend? Or that a legend might be the subject of an epic (here, indeed, was an epic ready made), might, under conditions, be the subject of a drama; but could not, under any conditions, be alone the subject of a picture? I don't for a moment suggest that he had, or that any artist ever goes to work in this double-entry, methodical way, but are we entitled to say that he was not influenced by his predilections, his determinations as a draughtsman, when he squared himself to illustrate the Bible? We say that the subject of a picture is the spirit of natural fact. If Botticelli was a painter, that is what he must have looked for, and must have found, in every picture he painted. Where, then, was he to get his natural facts in the story of Judith? What is, in that story, the natural,oil paintings for sale online, essential (as opposed to the historical, fleeting) fact? It is murder. Judith's deed was what the old Scots law incisively callsslauchter. It may be glossed over as assassination or even execution—in fact, in Florence, where Giuliano was soon to be taken off, it did not fail to be so called: it remains, however, just murder. Botticelli, not shirking the position at all, judged murder to be a natural fact, and its spirit or essence swiftness and stealth. Chaucer, let us note, had been of the same mind:
"The smyler with the knyf under his cloke,"
Earthwork out of Tuscany (London, 1895).
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