Volume 1
The history of Our Lord as exemplified in works of art : with that of His types, St. John the Baptist, and other persons of the Old and New Testament / commenced by the late Mrs. Jameson ; continued and completed by Lady Eastlake.
- Anna Brownell Jameson
- Date:
- 1865
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The history of Our Lord as exemplified in works of art : with that of His types, St. John the Baptist, and other persons of the Old and New Testament / commenced by the late Mrs. Jameson ; continued and completed by Lady Eastlake. Source: Wellcome Collection.
418/444 page 378
![A.J.'] second and mysterious significance of the apologue is at one glance revealed before us. It is Christ who stands on the threshold; the repentant sinner kneels before Him, and receives from His hand the Bread of life and the Sacrament of reconciliation ; while angels sound their silver trumpets, and singallelujahs. Very finely imagined, but, as it seems to me, not coming home to the heart like the lesson of human forgiveness in that simple representation of the offended father who folds in his arms his erring, long-lost son, and commands to kill the fatted calf: ‘For this my son was dead, and is alive again ; he was lost, and is found.’ The same application of the apologue of the Grood Samaritan may be found on a window of Bourges Cathedral. The traveller goes down from Jerusalem, the city of the blessed, to Jericho, the city of the accursed; and the double meaning is expressed by the lateral subjects, which form a commentary on the literal story painted in the central compartments; the same arrangement may be found on a window in the Cathedral at Sens, still more finely executed in regard to character and composition. In the usual treatment of the Kich Man and Lazarus, our compas- sion for the wretched Lazarus divides our feelings with a natural horror for the selfish sin of the Eich Man; but in Greek Art, and in the older representations, the attention is concentrated on the terrible doom of the Eich Man, which becomes a type, a foreshadowing, of the fate of the wicked in the day of judgment. Didron describes a picture which he brought from Greece, of the death and punishment of the Eich Man, which I forbear to translate. It appears that some similar impression of the real personal exist- ence of Lazarus and Dives prevailed in the middle ages. Lazarus was regarded as a saint, and became the patron saint of diseased beggars, and the places of refuge or hospitals dedicated to him were thence called Lazar-houses. In France he was St. Ladre. In Italian Art it should seem that the Venetians were the first who treated the parables as separate pictures, and in a popular manner, as domestic scenes—perhaps after the example of the Germans, with whom they were in constant relation. It is well known that the old Da Ponte family (old Bassano and his sons) had at Bassano a sort of manufactory of religious pictures.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24876239_0001_0420.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
