A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools: Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin
History
A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools: Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin
National Gallery (Great Britain); Painting -- England -- London -- Catalogs
jewelled cope, blue or green.[143] The face, of remarkable beauty,
after a type which all feel, though it is actually rare in art, is
probably a portrait of some distinguished churchman of Romanino's own
day: a second Gaudioso, perhaps, setting that later Brescian church to
rights after the terrible French occupation in the painter's own time,
as his saintly predecessor, the Gaudioso of the earlier century here
commemorated, had done after the invasion of the Goths. The eloquent
eyes are open upon some glorious vision. 'He hath made us kings and
priests!' they seem to say for him, as the clean, sensitive lips might
do so eloquently. Beauty and holiness had 'kissed each other,' as in
Borgognone's imperial deacons at the Certosa. At the Renaissance the
world might seem to have parted them again. But here certainly, once
more, Catholicism and the Renaissance, religion and culture, holiness
and beauty, might seem reconciled, by one who had conceived neither
after any feeble way, in a gifted person. Here at least, by the skill
of Romanino's hand, the obscure martyr of the crypts shines as a saint
of the later Renaissance, with a sanctity of which the elegant world
itself would hardly escape the fascination, and which reminds one how
the great Apostle St. Paul has made courtesy part of the content of the
Divine charity itself. A Rubens in Italy!--so Romanino has been called.
In this gracious presence we might think that, like Rubens also, he had
been a courtier" ("Art Notes in North Italy" in _New Review_, November
1890).
298. THE TWO ST. CATHERINES.
_Ambrogio Borgognone_ (Lombard: about 1455-1523).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account