Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second EditionHutton, Edward
History
Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second Edition
Hutton, Edward
Art -- Italy -- Florence; Genoa (Italy) -- History; Tuscany (Italy) -- Description and travel
Nazareth mounted on a mule, her little son in her arms, Joseph following
afoot, with a pipkin for the fire in the wilderness, and a _fiasco_ of
wine lest they be thirsty, a great stick over his shoulder for the
difficult way, and a cloak too, for our Lady. Or it is the Annunciation
he shows us: how in the dawn of that day of days, his bright wings still
tremulous with flight, Gabriel fell like a snowflake in the garden, in
the silence of the cypresses between two little loggias, light and fair,
where Madonna was praying; far and far away in the faint clear sky the
Dove hovers, that is the Spirit of God, the Desire of all Nations. Or it
is Hosanna he sings, when Christ rides under the stripped palms into
Jerusalem, while the people strew the way with branches. Or again he
will tell us of Paradise, beneath whose towers, in a garden of wild
flowers, the saints dance with the angels, crowned with garlands, in the
light that streams through the gates of heaven from the throne of God.
How may we rightly speak of such a man, who in his simplicity has seen
angels on the hills of Tuscany, the flowers and trees of our world
scattered in heaven? Truly his master is unknown, for, as perhaps he was
too simple to say, St. Luke taught him in an idle hour, after the vision
of the Annunciation, when he was tired of writing the Magnificat of
Mary: and Angelico was his only pupil. That such things as these could
come out of the cloister is not so marvellous as that, since they grew
there, we should have suppressed the convents and turned the friars
away. For just as the lily of art towered first and broke into blossom
on the grave of St. Francis, so here in the convent of S. Marco of the
Dominicans was one who for the first time seems to have seen the world,
the very byways and hills of Tuscany, and dreamed of them as heaven.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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