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Updated: May 3, 2025
In the Sistine Chapel they saw the cardinals kiss the toe of Pope Gregory XVI., and in the Corso, in broad daylight, they saw a monk come rolling down a staircase like a sack of potatoes, bundled into the street by a man and his wife. The second half of the winter was spent in Naples.
The landscape of Theocritus and the remains of ancient glories roused him to energetic sketching a sign of returning strength, which continued when he reached Rome, and enabled him to make a very fine copy of Botticelli's Zipporah, and other details of the Sistine frescoes.
I cannot imagine, for example, how the resolute champion of undeserving pictures can soar to the amazing beauty of Titian's great picture of the Assumption of the Virgin at Venice; or how the man who is truly affected by the sublimity of that exquisite production, or who is truly sensible of the beauty of Tintoretto's great picture of the Assembly of the Blessed in the same place, can discern in Michael Angelo's Last Judgment, in the Sistine chapel, any general idea, or one pervading thought, in harmony with the stupendous subject.
So far as they go, the enjoyments of the healthy body are as innocent and as ardent as those of the soul. As there is no ground of comparison, so there is no ground of antagonism. How compare a sonata and a sea-bath or measure the Sistine Madonna against a gallop across country? The best thanksgiving for each is to enjoy the other also, and educate the mind to ampler nobleness.
Such a look might have been on the face of the great Florentine, when he beheld the multitude gaze half in rapture, half in awe, on his work in the Sistine Chapel; then, folding his coarse garments round him, walked through the streets of Rome to his hermit dwelling, and sat himself down under the shadow of his desolate renown. Michael Vanbrugh continued,
Our happy, harmonious intimacy in the Sabine Hills and in Naples was responsible, before a year was past, for whole deluges of abuse in Danish newspapers. One morning, the Consul's man-servant brought me a permesso for the Collection of Sculpture in the Vatican for the same day, and a future permesso for the Loggias, Stanzas, and the Sistine Chapel. I laid the last in my pocket-book.
The proof remains in the twenty heads of those incomparable genii of the Sistine, each one of whom possesses a beauty and a quality peculiar to himself alone. They show that, if he had so chosen, he could have played upon the human countenance with the same facility as on the human body, varying its expressiveness ad infinitum.
The singer who spends nine or ten years in preparation, who is trained to sing florid parts as well as those which are dramatic she indeed can sing anything, the music of the old school as well as of the new. In Rome I gave a recital of old music, assisted by members of the Sistine Chapel choir. We gave much old music, some of it dating from the sixth century.
They talked of how the greatest masters of the High Renaissance Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael used to come here to study, and thus this little chapel became a great art school; and how, at the present time, it is esteemed by many one of the four most important art-buildings in the world; the others being, Arena Chapel, Padua, where are Giotto's frescoes; Sistine Chapel, Rome, where are Michael Angelo's greatest paintings; and Scuola di San Rocco, Venice, which is filled with Tintoretto's work.
Such was the aspect of the Sistine Chapel when Michelangelo began his great work. Perugino's three frescoes on the west wall were afterwards demolished to make room for his Last Judgment. The two frescoes on the east wall are now poor pictures by very inferior masters; but the twelve Scripture histories and Botticelli's twenty-eight Popes remain from the last years of the fifteenth century.
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