He has indeed the strong wing and
the swiftness of the king of birds. And yet the works of few really
great painters--and among the really great we place Ferrari--leave
upon the mind a more distressing sense of imperfection. Extraordinary
fertility of fancy, vehement dramatic passion, sincere study of
nature, and great command of technical resources are here (as
elsewhere in Ferrari's frescoes) neutralised by an incurable defect of
the combining and harmonising faculty, so essential to a masterpiece.
There is stuff enough of thought and vigour and imagination to make
a dozen artists. And yet we turn away disappointed from the crowded,
dazzling, stupefying wilderness of forms and faces on these mighty
walls.
All that Ferrari derived from actual life--the heads of single
figures, the powerful movement of men and women in excited action, the
monumental pose of two praying nuns--is admirably rendered. His angels
too, in S. Cristoforo as elsewhere, are quite original; not only in
their type of beauty, which is terrestrial and peculiar to Ferrari,
without a touch of Correggio's sensuality; but also in the intensity
of their emotion, the realisation of their vitality. Those which hover
round the Cross in the fresco of the 'Crucifixion' are as passionate
as any angels of the Giottesque masters in Assisi. Those again which
crowd the Stable of Bethlehem in the 'Nativity' yield no point of
idyllic charm to Gozzoli's in the Riccardi Chapel.
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