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Updated: May 4, 2025
The most lovely moving picture actor, considered in the light of genuine aesthetic values, is no more than a piece of vulgarity; his like is to be found, not in the Uffizi gallery or among the harmonies of Brahms, but among the plush sofas, rococo clocks and hand-painted oil-paintings of a third-rate auction room. All women, save the least intelligent, penetrate this imposture with sharp eyes.
Another Andrea del Sarto, the "Disputa sulla Trinita," No. 172, is close by, nobly drawn but again not of his absolute best, and then five more Raphaels or putative Raphaels No. 171, Tommaso Inghirami; No. 61, Angelo Doni, the collector and the friend of artists, for whom Michelangelo painted his "Holy Family" in the Uffizi; No. 59, Maddalena Doni; and above all No. 174, "The Vision of Ezekiel," that little great picture, so strong and spirited, and to coin a word Sixtinish.
In the Vienna picture he is eagerly interested in the cross which the little St. John gives him. In the Uffizi picture he is more serious, and strokes the goldfinch with an air of abstraction, meditating on the holy things his mother has been reading to him. The arrangement of the three figures is the same in all the pictures, and is so entirely simple that we forget the greatness of the art.
The moist atmosphere about the Arno, I suppose, produces these insects, and fills the broad, ten-mile valley with them; and as we are just on the brim of the basin, they overflow into our windows. September 25th. U and I walked to town yesterday morning, and went to the Uffizi gallery.
Indeed, there is no more beautiful light in any picture we shall see, and the Virgin's melancholy face is inexpressibly sweet. Perugino is best represented at the Accademia, and there are works of his at the Uffizi and Pitti and in various Florentine churches; but here he is at his best.
Once he was stirred into something of the Pagan spirit, probably under the influence of the court of Lorenzo, and he touched the real note of Pantheism in the "Pan," of the Berlin Gallery, and the noble figures in the background of the Uffizi and Munich "Madonnas."
This morning I went with U to the Uffizi gallery, and again looked with more or less attention at almost every picture and statue. I saw a little picture of the golden age, by Zucchero, in which the charms of youths and virgins are depicted with a freedom that this iron age can hardly bear to look at.
The heavy, coarse study for a "Death of Lucretia," also in the Uffizi, I find extremely hard, in comparison with any of the foregoing, to accept as an undoubted work of the master, although I am not prepared to absolutely deny it. There is a want of proportion in the figures, and an indecision in the strokes, hard to reconcile with all we know of his work.
All the marble panelling, pilasters, niches, and so forth, which at present clothe the walls and dominate the architectural effect, are clearly planned for mural monuments. A rude sketch preserved in the Uffizi throws some light upon the intermediate stages of the scheme.
Evidently not intended by nature as a husband or father. Like Watteau, like Nietzsche, grand visionaries abiding on the other side of the dear common joys of life, these men were not tempted by the usual baits of happiness. The great Calumnia in the Uffizi might be construed as an image of Botticelli's soul.
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