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
Hence, among these Germans, the dreadful seriousness and pathos of the
Passion, the violence of the mob, the brutality of the executioners,
above all, the awful sadness of Christ. There is here somewhat of the
realisation of what He must have felt in finding the world He had come
to redeem so vile and cruel. In what way, under what circumstances,
such thoughts would come to these men, is revealed to us by that
magnificent head of the suffering Saviour--a design apparently for a
carved crucifix--under which Albrecht Dürer wrote the pathetic words:
"I drew this in my sickness."
Thus much of the power of that new factor, the individual interest in
the Scriptures. All other innovations on the treatment of religious
themes were due, in the sixteenth century, but still more in the
seventeenth, to the development of some new artistic possibility, or
to the gathering together in the hands of one man of artistic powers
hitherto existing only in a dispersed condition. This is the secret
of the greatness of Raphael as a pictorial poet, that he could do all
manner of new things merely by holding all the old means in his grasp.
This is the secret of those wonderful inventions of his, which do not
take our breath away like Michelangelo's or Rembrandt's, but seem at the
moment the one and only right rendering of the subject: the Liberation
of St. Peter, Heliodorus, Ezechiel, and the whole series of magnificent
Old Testament stories on the ceiling of the Loggie. In Raphael we see
the perfect fulfilment of the Giottesque programme: he can do all that
the first theme inventors required for the carrying out of their ideas;
and therefore he can have new, entirely new, themes. Raphael furnishes,
for the first time since Giotto, an almost complete set of pictorial
interpretations of Scripture.
We are now, as we proceed in the sixteenth century, in the region where
new artistic powers admit of new imaginative conceptions on the part
of the individual. We gain immensely by the liberation from the old
tradition, but we lose immensely also. We get the benefit of the fancy
and feelings of this individual, but we are at the mercy, also, of his
stupidity and vulgarity. Of this the great examples are Tintoretto, and
after him Velasquez and Rembrandt. Of Tintoret I would speak later,
for he is eminently the artist in whom the gain and the loss are most
typified, and perhaps most equally distributed, and because, therefore,
he contrasts best with the masters anterior to Raphael.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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