beautiful and the graceful in their highest qualities, we should
have expected another judgment, could have ventured to name together
Raffaelle and Murillo as angel painters. It is true, in speaking of
the Visit to Abraham, she admits that the painter has set aside the
angelic and mystic character, and merely represented three young men
travellers; but she generally, throughout these volumes, speaks of
that favourite Spaniard in terms of the highest admiration,--terms,
as we think, little merited. The angels in the Sutherland Collection
are as vulgar figures as can well be, and quite antagonistic in
feeling to a heavenly mission. We confess that we dislike almost
all the pictures by this so much esteemed master: their artistic
manner is to us uncertain and unpleasing,--disagreeable in colour,
deficient in grace. We often wonder at the excess of present
admiration. We look upon his vulgarity in scriptural subjects as
quite profane. His highest power was in a peasant gentleness; he
could not embody a sacred feeling: yet thus is he praised for a
performance beyond his power:--"St Andrew is suspended on the
high cross, formed not of planks, but of the trunks of trees laid
transversely. He is bound with cords, undraped, except by a linen
cloth, his silver hair and beard loosely streaming on the air, his
aged countenance illuminated by a heavenly transport, as he looks up
to the opening skies, whence two angels, of really celestial beauty,
like almost all Murillo's angels, descend with the crown and palm."
The angels of Correggio are certainly peculiar: they are not quite
celestial, but perhaps are sympathetically more lovely from their
touch of humanity; they are ever pure. Those in the Ascension of
the the Virgin, in the Cupola at Parma, seem to be rather adopted
angels than of the "first estate;" for they are of several ages,
and, if we mistake not, many of them are feminine, and, we suspect,
are meant really to represent the loveliest of earth beatified,
adopted into the heavenly choir. Those who have seen Signor Toschi's
fine drawings of the Parma frescoes, (now in progress of engraving),
will readily give assent to this impression. We remember this
feeling crossing our mind, and as it were lightly touching the
heart with angelic wings--if we have lost a daughter of that sweet
age, let us fondly see her there. We cannot forbear quoting the
passage upon the angels of Titian:--"And Titian's angels impress
me in a similar manner: I mean those in the glorious Assumption at
Venice, with their childish forms and features, but an expression
caught from beholding the face of 'our Father which is in heaven:'
it is glorified infancy. I remember standing before this picture,
contemplating those lovely spirits one after another, until a thrill
came over me, like that which I felt when Mendelssohn played the
organ: I became music while I listened. The face of one of those
angels is to the face of a child, just what that of the Virgin, in
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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