The
backgrounds still retain a bedimmed splendor of gilding. There is a
plentiful use of red, and I can conceive that the pictures must have shed
an illumination through the churches where they were displayed. There is
often, too, a minute care bestowed on the faces in the pictures, and
sometimes a very strong expression, stronger than modern artists get, and
it is very strange how they attained this merit while they were so
inconceivably rude in other respects. It is remarkable that all the
early faces of the Madonna are especially stupid, and all of the same
type, a sort of face such as one might carve on a pumpkin, representing a
heavy, sulky, phlegmatic woman, with a long and low arch of the nose.
This same dull face continues to be assigned to the Madonna, even when
the countenances of the surrounding saints and angels are characterized
with power and beauty, so that I think there must have been some portrait
of this sacred personage reckoned authentic, which the early painters
followed and religiously repeated.
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