FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   147   148   149   150   151   152   153   154   155   156   157   158  
159   160   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   169   170   171   172   173   174   175   176   177   178   179   180   181   182   183   >>   >|  
ters before Albert Durer, which makes the specific difference, evident to every boy, between the drawing of the Teutonic and Italian schools? But if so, what becomes of the theory which calls Pagan art by all manner of hard names? which dates the downfall of Christian art from the moment when painters first lent an eye to its pernicious seductions? How can those escape the charge of eclecticism, who, without going to the root-idea of Greek art, filched from its outside just as much as suited their purpose? And how, lastly, can M. Rio's school of critics escape the charge of Manichean contempt for God's world and man, not as ascetics have fancied him, but as God has made him, when they think it a sufficient condemnation of a picture to call it naturalistic; when they talk and act about art as if the domain of the beautiful were the devil's kingdom, from which some few species of form and elements were to be stolen by Christian painters, and twisted from their original evil destination into the service of religion? On the other hand, we owe much to those early ascetic painters; their works are a possession for ever. No future school of religious art will be able to rise to eminence without taking full cognisance of them, and learning from them their secret. They taught artists, and priests, and laymen too, that beauty is only worthy of admiration when it is the outward sacrament of the beauty of the soul within; they helped to deliver men from that idolatry to merely animal strength and loveliness into which they were in danger of falling in ferocious ages, and among the relics of Roman luxury; they asserted the superiority of the spirit over the flesh; according to their light, they were faithful preachers of the great Christian truth, that devoted faith, and not fierce self-will, is man's glory. Well did their pictures tell to brutal peasant, and to still more brutal warrior, that God's might was best shown forth, not in the elephantine pride of a Hercules, or the Titanic struggles of a Laocoon, but in the weakness of martyred women, and of warriors who were content meekly to endure shame and death, for the sake of Him who conquered by sufferings, and bore all human weaknesses; who "was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and, like a sheep dumb before the shearer, opened not his mouth." We must conclude with a few words on one point on which we differ somewhat from Mrs. Jameson--the allegoric origin of certain l
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   147   148   149   150   151   152   153   154   155   156   157   158  
159   160   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   169   170   171   172   173   174   175   176   177   178   179   180   181   182   183   >>   >|  



Top keywords:
Christian
 

painters

 

school

 

charge

 

escape

 
beauty
 
brutal
 

superiority

 
spirit
 

asserted


luxury

 

relics

 
devoted
 

fierce

 
faithful
 

preachers

 
conclude
 
outward
 

admiration

 

sacrament


worthy

 

differ

 

helped

 

loveliness

 

danger

 

falling

 

strength

 

animal

 

deliver

 

idolatry


ferocious

 
weakness
 

allegoric

 

martyred

 

warriors

 
Laocoon
 

Titanic

 
struggles
 

origin

 
content

meekly
 

sufferings

 
weaknesses
 
endure
 

Jameson

 

Hercules

 
peasant
 

shearer

 
opened
 

conquered