Ideas of Good and EvilYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Philosophy
Ideas of Good and Evil
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Essays
Though with many doubts, I am tempted to value Flaxman's designs to the
'Inferno,' the 'Purgatorio,' and the 'Paradiso,' only a little above the
best of these, because he does not seem to have ever been really moved by
Dante, and so to have sunk into a formal manner, which is a reflection of
the vital manner of his Homer and Hesiod. His designs to _The Divine
Comedy_ will be laid, one imagines, with some ceremony in that immortal
wastepaper-basket in which Time carries with many sighs the failures of
great men. I am perhaps wrong, however, because Flaxman even at his best
has not yet touched me very deeply, and I hardly ever hope to escape this
limitation of my ruling stars. That Signorelli does not seem greatly more
interesting except here and there, as in the drawing of 'The Angel,' full
of innocence and energy, coming from the boat which has carried so many
souls to the foot of the mountain of purgation, can only be because one
knows him through poor reproductions from frescoes half mouldered away
with damp. A little-known series, drawn by Adolph Stürler, an artist of
German extraction, who was settled in Florence in the first half of this
century, are very poor in drawing, very pathetic and powerful in
invention, and full of most interesting pre-Raphaelitic detail. There are
admirable and moving figures, who, having set love above reason, listen in
the last abandonment of despair to the judgment of Minos, or walk with a
poignant melancholy to the foot of his throne through a land where owls
and strange beasts move hither and thither with the sterile content of the
evil that neither loves nor hates, and a Cerberus full of patient cruelty.
All Stürler's designs have, however, the languor of a mind that does its
work by a succession of delicate critical perceptions rather than the
decision and energy of true creation, and are more a curious contribution
to artistic methods than an imaginative force.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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