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Updated: May 18, 2025
The four Van der Weydens in the gallery of Primitives are not all of equal merit. The Annunciation is the most striking. The early master of Memling is distinguished by a sweetness in composition and softness in colouring. Mention must be made of the De Vos pictures by the Cornelis, Martin, and Simon.
The pattern needed much care, and Lambert induced Hans Memling himself, who drew it so that it could be pricked out for the cushion. In after times it might have been held a greater honour to work from his pattern than for the Duchess, who sent to inquire after it more than once, and finally desired that Mistress Grisell should bring her cushion and show her progress.
The Virgin, they have discovered, is not that grandly dressed lady, always in the very finest brocade, with the very finest manners, and holding a divine infant that has no earthly wants, whom Van Eyck and Memling and Meister Stephan painted.
Leaning there, wondering with himself whether he would wait awhile and paint quietly in this dim street, haunted with the shades of Memling and Maes, and Otto Veneris and Philip de Champagne, or whether he would go into the East and seek new types, and lie under the red Egyptian heavens and create a true Cleopatra, which no man has ever done yet, young Cleopatra, ankle-deep in roses and fresh from Cæsar's kisses, leaning there, he saw a little peasant go by below, with two little white feet in two wooden shoes, and a face that had the pure and simple radiance of a flower.
In all these pictures Crivelli reveals himself as an artist filled with emotional inspiration, to whom the thrill of life is more than its trappings, and one, moreover, who observes, balances and differentiates. The society of his saints and angels is stimulating; the element of the unexpected enters into his work in open defiance of his pronounced mannerism. It is possible to detect beneath the close and manifold coverings of his ornate decoration a swift flame of imaginative impulse such as Blake sent into the world without such covering. He would have pleased Blake by this nervous energy and by his pure bright coloring, despite the fact that he signed himself "Venetus." He painted in tempera and finished his work with care and deliberation. It is remarkable that so little of his mental fire died out in the slow process of his execution. It is still more remarkable that in spite of his reactionary tendencies, his archaistic use of gold and relief at a moment when all great artists were renouncing these, he is intensely modern in his sentiment. He seems to represent a phase of human development at which we in America have but recently arrived; a phase in which appreciation of ancient finished forms of beauty is united to a restless eagerness and the impulse toward exaggerated self-expression. He is supposed to have been born about 1440, which would make him a contemporary of the two Bellini, of Hans Memling and of Mantegna. Had he only been able to give his imagination a higher range had he possessed a more controlling spiritual ideal, had the touch of self-consciousness that rests like a grimace on the otherwise lovely aspect of much of his painting, been eliminated, he would have stood with these on the heights of fifteenth century art. We are fortunate to have in America the Boston Museum Piet
We may add that not one of these so-called Van Eycks recalls in all their native delicacy and richness the real Van Eycks of Bruges, Ghent, and Brussels; though the Virgin Reading, given as Jan's handiwork, is of a charm. The altar piece is excellent. But there is a fine Memling, glowing in pigment and of beautiful design, The Adoration of the Kings, a triptych, like the one at Bruges.
They were, 'To Gerard Eliassoen, these by the hand of the trusty Hans Memling, with all speed." "'Tis well. Now, how was the letter folded? how big was it?" "Longer than that one, and not so long as this." "'Tis well. Where is he?" "At the hostelry." "Come, then, take you this groat, and treat him. Then ask to see the letter, and put this in place of it. Come to me with the other letter."
The difference between the two classes of work is much that between, say, John Van Eyck or Memling and Rubens or Rembrandt, or, again, between Giovanni Bellini and Tintoretto; the aims of the one class of work are incompatible with those of the other.
And he seized his hat and ran furiously about the streets for hours. Towards sunset he came back white as a ghost. He had not found Memling; but his poor mind had had time to realise the woman's simple words, that Death spares none. He crept into the house bent, and feeble as an old man, and refused all food.
The secular odour of Bruges was not unpleasant in October; in August it may have been. We know that the glory of the city hath departed, but there remain the Memlings, the Gerard Davids, at least one Van Eyck, not to mention several magnificent old churches. Let us stroll to the Béguinage. Reproductions of Memling and Van Eyck are in almost every window.
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