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Updated: June 10, 2025
The inner half could be shut away by folding-doors, and its highly polished sideboard, chairs, table, a silver epergne towering upon it, glimmered in a dusky element that relegated it, when not illuminated for use, to a mere ghostly decorativeness. By contrast, the drawing-room was vivid.
Far nobler and more beautiful than its Arabic decorativeness in tinted stucco is the palace begun by Charles V., after a design in the spirit of the supreme hour of the Italian Renaissance. It is not a ruin in its long arrest, and one hears with hopeful sympathy that the Spanish king means some day to complete it.
The result is instead of a pretty but chaotic decorativeness interspersed with florid and meaningless exaggerations a complete and beautiful whole marred by no redundancy or incongruity. Their full play of intelligence brought to bear upon the suggestions of the poet has developed a series of pictures which give occasionally a delightful sense of surprise at their grace and unexpectedness.
The colossal effigies of the fat women and the tuft-headed Circassian girls of cheap museums; the vistas of shabby cross streets; the survival of an old hip-roofed house here and there at their angles; the Swiss chalet, histrionic decorativeness of the stations in prospect or retrospect; the vagaries of the lines that narrowed together or stretched apart according to the width of the avenue, but always in wanton disregard of the life that dwelt, and bought and sold, and rejoiced or sorrowed, and clattered or crawled, around, below, above were features of the frantic panorama that perpetually touched his sense of humor and moved his sympathy.
He said that if the tasteful decorativeness of the thing did not kill it with the public outright, its literary excellence would give it the finishing stroke. Perhaps that might be overlooked in the impression of novelty which a first number would give, but it must never happen again.
With these frescoes of Giotto I should wish to compare Fra Angelico's great ceremonial crucifixion in the cloister chapel of San Marco of Florence; for it displays to an extraordinary degree that juxtaposition of the most conventionally idealistic, pious decorativeness with the realism straightforward, unreflecting, and heartless to the point of becoming perfectly grotesque.
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