United States or Germany ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Sandro stood facing her, moody and troubled, fingering his brushes and bits of charcoal; his shaggy brows were knit, he seemed to be breathing hard. He collected himself with an effort and looked up at her as she stood before him shrinking, awe-struck, panting at the thing she had done.
Sandro was on his knees with his face pressed against the pulpit and tears running through his fingers as he prayed. "As he had seen her, so he painted. As at the beginning of life in a cold world, passively meeting the long trouble of it, he painted her a rapt Presence floating evenly to our earth.
There are a few great painters, like Michelangelo or Leonardo, whose work has become a force in general culture, partly for this very reason that they have absorbed into themselves all such workmen as Sandro Botticelli; and, over and above mere technical or antiquarian criticism, general criticism may be very well employed in that sort of interpretation which adjusts the position of these men to general culture, whereas smaller men can be the proper subjects only of technical or antiquarian treatment.
In the Allegory of Spring in the Academy of Florence, we again have the antique; goddesses and nymphs whose clinging garments the gentle Sandro Botticelli has assuredly studied from some old statue of Agrippina or Faustina; but what strange livid tints are there beneath those draperies, what eccentric gestures are those of the nymphs, what a green, ghostlike light illumines this garden of Venus Are these goddesses and nymphs immortal women such as the ancients conceived, or are they not rather fantastic fairies or nixen, Titanias and Undines, incorporeal daughters of dew and gossamer and mist?
"Oh, we know one another pretty well," said he with a nod. "Never the jam without the powder from you." "But always the jam," said old Maria. "And you'll find the world a good deal like your aunt, Sandro." An odd half-cunning half-eager gleam shot across his eyes. "A man finds the world what he makes it," he said. He rose, came and stood over her, and went on, laughing.
Certainly she did not love him a social abyss separated them but could not her beauty and power in some way be allied with his, so that the world should be made better? "Shame is of the brute dullard who thinks shame," came the resonant voice of the reader. The words rang in her ears. Sandro was greater than the mere flesh she would be, too.
Among these, says Vasari, were his friends Francesco Granacci and Giuliano Bugiardini, Bastiano da San Gallo surnamed Aristotele, Angelo di Donnino, Jacopo di Sandro, and Jacopo surnamed l'Indaco.
The precision required in this trade forced artists to study the modelling of the human form, and promoted that crude naturalism which has been charged against their pictures. Carefully to observe, minutely to imitate some actual person the Sandro of your workshop or the Cecco from the marketplace became the pride of painters.
But although this picture is exceedingly beautiful, and ought to have put envy to shame, yet there were certain malevolent and censorious persons who, not being able to fix any other blame upon it, declared that Matteo and Sandro had fallen into grievous heresy."
And Simonetta walked alone down the way with her head high; but Sandro stepped behind, at the edge of her trailing white robe.... ... The poet was leaning against an ancient alabaster vase, soil-stained, yellow with age and its long sojourn in the loam, but with traces of its carved garlands clinging to it still. He fingered it lovingly as he talked.
Word Of The Day