United States or South Sudan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"To keep you here is about as sacrilegious as it would have been to thrust St. Catherine among the chain-gang in the galleys," muttered the doctor. "No doubt duty called her to much worse places; therefore, when she died, the angels buried her on Sinai," answered the prisoner; before whose wistful eyes drifted the memory of Luini's picture.
What sadness in the lovely faces of S. Catherine and Lawrence! What divine anguish in the loosened limbs and bending body of Christ; what piety in the adoring old man! All the moods proper to this supreme tragedy of the faith are touched as in some tenor song with low accompaniment of viols; for it was Luini's special province to feel profoundly and to express musically.
The masterpiece of this style, and probably Tintoret's masterpiece therefore, is the great Crucifixion at S. Rocco. To feel its full tragic splendour one must think of the finest things which the early Renaissance achieved, such as Luini's beautiful fresco at Lugano; by the side of the painting at S. Rocco everything is tame, except, perhaps, Rembrandt's etching called the Three Crosses.
A letter from Da Loglio got me a warm welcome from the castrato Luini, a delightful man, who kept a splendid table. He was the lover of Colonna, the singer, but their affection seemed to me a torment, for they could scarce live together in peace for a single day. At Luini's house I met another castrato, Millico, a great friend of the chief huntsman, Narischkin, who also became one of my friends.
Luini's picture is one which readily touches the heart. The Virgin unites the sweetness of fresh, young motherhood with womanly dignity of character. Her smile has nothing of mystery in it; it is simply sweet and winning. The Christ-child is a lovely boy, steadying himself against his mother's breast, and yet with an air of self-reliance. The two understand each other well.
A whole symphony of praise has been lavished on this miraculously beautiful creation in which psychical and physical perfection have been blended with potent and subtle genius. 1598, S. wall, Virgin and Child and St. Anne, attributed to the same, though of somewhat doubtful authenticity, is worth careful study. By another Milanese master is 1354, S. wall, Luini's Virgin and Sleeping Child.
I felt that if one were to take a person with no idea of architecture and set him in front of these buildings, there would fall like scales from his eyes, and he would say: "Now I know what the building art means." Luini's exquisite painting, Vanity and Modesty, in the Galleria Sciarra, impressed me profoundly. It represented two women, one nun- like, the other magnificently dressed.
He gives himself up not to write beautiful thoughts: he seeks to build up a beautiful world.... When I see this author of 'Modern Painters' and the 'Stones of Venice, the man who has exhausted almost all that Europe contains of the beautiful, who has thought and spoken of almost every phase of human life, and has entered so deeply into the highest mysteries of the greatest poets when I see him surrounding himself in his old age with lads and lasses, schoolgirls and workmen, teaching them the elements of science and art, reading to them poems and tales, arranging for them games and holidays, ornaments and dresses, lavishing on these young people his genius and his wealth, his fame and his future I confess my memory goes back instinctively to a fresco I saw in Italy years ago was it Luini's? wherein the Master sat in a crowd of children and forbade them to be removed, saying that 'of such is the kingdom of heaven."
Anthony by no means in his best style, and inferior to all his other paintings in this church. The Sebastian, for example, shows an effort to vary the traditional treatment of this saint. He is tied in a sprawling attitude to a tree; and little of Luini's special pathos or sense of beauty the melody of idyllic grace made spiritual appears in him. These four saints are on the piers.
By the discipline of five hundred years they had learned and inherited such power, that whereas all former painters could be right only by effort, they could be right with ease; and whereas all former painters could be right only under restraint, they could be right, free. Tintoret's touch, Luini's, Correggio's, Reynolds', and Velasquez's, are all as free as the air, and yet right.
Word Of The Day