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Updated: May 21, 2025
Sumner one day, as they returned from the Academy, where they had been looking at casts and photographs of his sculptured works, "that though Michael Angelo was undoubtedly greatest as a sculptor, yet his most important works in the world of art are his paintings. Those grand frescoes in the Sistine Chapel in Rome alone afforded him sufficient scope for his wonderful creative genius.
And of a truth, if her corpse was actually exposed in the chapel of the Eremitani, as we have some right to assume, the spectacle must have been impressive. Those grim gaunt frescoes of Mantegna looked down on her as she lay stretched upon her bier, solemn and calm, and, but for pallor, beautiful as though in life.
How that lime devours the ultramarine! When the frescoes were finished, and Perugino had received from the monk the agreed price, he placed in his hand a package of blue powder: 'This is for you, father. Your ultramarine which I took with my brush fell to the bottom of my cup, whence I gathered it every day. I return it to you. Learn to trust honest people."
Granting the probability that there were few, if any, of our English frescoes which would be comparable in artistic interest with those in Italy, where the art was so sedulously cultivated, it must nevertheless be remembered that only a fragment remains here and there out of all the work which must have been produced, and that after the Reformation even those works which did survive were treated with positive as well as negative obloquy, so that where they have been preserved at all it is only by having been whitewashed over or otherwise hidden and damaged.
William of Orange gave the painter lodgings at Hampton Court, where it seems he painted the Labours of Hercules in chiaro-oscuro, and repaired Andrea Mantegna's pictures of the Triumphs of Julius Cæsar. The commissioners for rebuilding St. Paul's Cathedral unanimously chose Laguerre to decorate the cupola with frescoes.
John Baptist, where Elizabeth is a little troubled, it may be, about her dumb husband, to whom the child has been brought. An old man with an eager and noble gesture seems to argue with Zacharias, holding the child the while by the shoulder, and Zacharias writes the name on his knee. Below this again is the Dance of Herodias, the first of these frescoes to be uncovered and ruined in the process.
Ricci tells us, are altogether restorations. For the rest, these mosaics have suffered much, both from restoration, properly so called, and from painting. The pavement is old and beautiful, as I think are the walls, but the frescoes, once by Luca Longhi, are most unworthy and out of place.
Leo's first words on taking his place in the Vatican were addressed to his brother Giuliano: 'Let us enjoy the Papacy, now that God has given it to us; and his notion of enjoyment was to surround himself with court-poets, jesters, and musicians, to adorn his Roman palaces with frescoes, to collect statues and inscriptions, to listen to Latin speeches, and to pass judgment upon scholarly compositions.
It was I who sailed from the Bosphorus in that ship, with Julia beside me; I from whom the Moorish pirates tore her, on the beach beside Tetuan; I who, centuries after, drew those obscene figures on the wall of your church the devil, the nun, and the barred convent when Julia, another Julia but the same soul, was denied to me and forced into a nunnery. For the frescoes, too, tell my history.
This form of ornamentation, so much used by Signorelli in these frescoes, adds greatly to their decorative beauty. Under this painting is a square-shaped portrait, half cut away by a recess, in which stands a modern altar. It is supposed by Luzi to represent Homer, and is the first of a series which run all round the walls, much repainted, but all of them the work of the master himself.
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