The effect, when these pictures, some of them very large, were new
and freshly gilded, must have been exceedingly brilliant, and much
resembling, on an immensely larger scale, the rich illuminations in an
old monkish missal. In fact, we have not now, in pictorial ornament,
anything at all comparable to what their splendor must have been. I was
most struck with a picture, by Fabriana Gentile, of the Adoration of the
Magi, where the faces and figures have a great deal of life and action,
and even grace, and where the jewelled crowns, the rich embroidered
robes, and cloth of gold, and all the magnificence of the three kings,
are represented with the vividness of the real thing: a gold sword-hilt,
for instance, or a pair of gold spurs, being actually embossed on the
picture. The effect is very powerful, and though produced in what modern
painters would pronounce an unjustifiable way, there is yet pictorial art
enough to reconcile it to the spectator's mind. Certainly, the people of
the Middle Ages knew better than ourselves what is magnificence, and how
to produce it; and what a glorious work must that have been, both in its
mere sheen of burnished gold, and in its illuminating art, which shines
thus through the gloom of perhaps four centuries.
Pages:
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489
490
491
492
493
494
495