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
There is, for instance, the story of a good young man (with a name for
a fairy tale too, Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini!) showing his adventures by
land and sea and at many courts, the honours conferred on him by kings
and emperors, and how at last he was made Pope, having begun as a mere
poor scholar on a grey nag; all painted by Pinturicchio in the Cathedral
library of Siena. There is the lamentable story of a bride and bridegroom,
by Vittore Carpaccio: the stately, tall bride, St. Ursula, and the dear
little foolish bridegroom, looking like her little brother; a story
containing a great many incidents: the sending of an embassy to the King;
the King being sorely puzzled in his mind, leaning his arm upon his bed
and asking the Queen's advice; the presence upon the palace steps of an
ill-favoured old lady, with a crutch and basket, suspiciously like the
bad fairy who had been forgotten at the christening; the apparition of
an angel to the Princess, sleeping, with her crown neatly put away at
the foot of the bed; the arrival of the big ship in foreign parts, with
the Bishop and Clergy putting their heads out of the port-holes and
asking very earnestly, "Where are we?" and finally, a most fearful
slaughter of the Princess and her eleven thousand ladies-in-waiting. The
same Carpaccio--a regular old gossip from whom one would expect all the
formulas, "and then he says to the king, Sacred Crown," "and then the
Prince walks, walks, walks, walks." "A company of knights in armour nice
and shining," "three comely ladies in a green meadow," and so forth of
the professional Italian story-teller--the same Carpaccio, who was also,
and much more than the more solemn Giovanni Bellini, the first Venetian
to handle oil paints like Titian and Giorgione, painted the fairy tale
of St. George, with quite the most dreadful dragon's walk, a piece of
sea sand embedded with bones and half-gnawed limbs, and crawled over
by horrid insects, that any one could wish to see; and quite the most
comical dragon, particularly when led out for execution among the
minarets and cupolas and camels and turbans and symbols of a kind of
small Constantinople.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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