On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2): A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and LiteratureRuskin, John
General
On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2): A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature
Ruskin, John
Art; Essays; Literature
This drawing of Mr. Jones's, however, is far less representative of his
scale of power than either of the two pieces already described, which
have both cost their artists much care and time; while this little
water-color has been perhaps done in the course of a summer afternoon.
It is only about seven inches by nine: the figures of the average size
of Angelico's on any altar predella; and the heads, of those on an
average Corinthian or Syracusan coin. The bride and bridegroom sit on a
slightly raised throne at the side of the picture, the bride nearest us;
her head seen in profile, a little bowed. Before them, the three
bridesmaids and their groomsmen dance in circle, holding each other's
hands, bare-footed, and dressed in long dark blue robes. Their figures
are scarcely detached from the dark background, which is a willful
mingling of shadow and light, as the artist chose to put them,
representing, as far as I remember, nothing in particular. The deep tone
of the picture leaves several of the faces in obscurity, and none are
drawn with much care, not even the bride's; but with enough to show that
her features are at least as beautiful as those of an ordinary Greek
goddess, while the depth of the distant background throws out her pale
head in an almost lunar, yet unexaggerated, light; and the white and
blue flowers of her narrow coronal, though _merely_ white and blue,
shine, one knows not how, like gems. Her bridegroom stoops forward a
little to look at her, so that we see his front face, and can see also
that he loves her.
231. Such being the respective effort and design of the three pictures,
although I put by, for the moment, any question of their mechanical
skill or manner, it must yet, I believe, be felt by the reader that, as
works of young men, they contained, and even nailed to the Academy
gates, a kind of Lutheran challenge to the then accepted teachers in
all European schools of Art: perhaps a little too shrill and petulant in
the tone of it, but yet curiously resolute and steady in its triple
Fraternity, as of William of Burglen with his Melchthal and Stauffacher,
in the Grutli meadow, not wholly to be scorned by even the knightliest
powers of the Past.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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