Renaissance Fancies and Studies: Being a Sequel to EuphorionLee, Vernon
History
Renaissance Fancies and Studies: Being a Sequel to Euphorion
Lee, Vernon
Art, Italian; Art, Renaissance -- Italy
The fairy business of the story of the Three Kings takes even greater
proportions in the delightful frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli in the Riccardi
Chapel. Here the Holy Family are suppressed, so to speak, altogether,
tucked into the altar in a picture, and the act of adoration at Bethlehem
becomes the mere excuse for the romantic adventures of three people of
the highest quality. The journey itself, where Gentile da Fabriano sums
up in that procession twisting about the background of his picture, here
occupies a whole series of frescoes. And on this journey is concentrated
all that the Renaissance knew of splendour, delightfulness, and romance.
The green valleys, watered by twisting streams, with matted grasses,
which Botticelli puts behind his enthroned Madonna and victorious
Judith; Angelico's favourite hillsides with blossoming fruit trees and
pointing cypresses; the mysterious firwoods--more mysterious for their
remoteness on the high Apennines--which fascinate the fancy of Filippo
Lippi; all this is here, and through it all winds the procession of
the Three Kings. There are the splendid stuffs and Oriental jewels and
trappings, the hounds and monkeys, and jesters and negroes, the falcon
on the wrist, the lynxes chained to the saddle, all the magnificence
dreamed by Gentile da Fabriano; and among it all ride, met by bevies
of peacock-winged angels, kneeling and singing before the flowering
rose-hedges, the Three Kings. The old man, who looks like some Platonist
philosopher, the beardless prince, surrounded by his noisy huntsmen and
pages; and that dark-bearded youth in the Byzantine dress and shovel
hat, the genuine king from the East, riding with ardent, wistful eyes, a
beautiful kingly young Quixote: Sir Percival seeking the Holy Grail, or
King Cophetua seeking for his beggar girl. It is a page of fairy tale,
retold by Boiardo or Spenser.
After such things as these it is difficult to speak of those more
prosaic tales, really intended as such, on which the painters of the
Renaissance spent their fancy. Still they have all their charm, these
fairy tales, not of the great poets indeed, but of the nursery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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