Memoirs of the early Italian painters / by Anna Jameson; thoroughly revised and in part rewritten by Estelle M. Hurll.
- Anna Brownell Jameson
- Date:
- 1899
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Memoirs of the early Italian painters / by Anna Jameson; thoroughly revised and in part rewritten by Estelle M. Hurll. Source: Wellcome Collection.
37/335 page 3
![Happily the most eloquent and influential among the fathers of the Church, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and St. Bernard, took up the other side of the question ; the pope, Adrian L, threw his infallibility into the scale; and from the eighth century we find it decided, and afterwards confirmed by a papal bull, that the Redeemer should be represented with all the attributes of divine beauty which Art in its then rude state could lend him. Since that time the accepted and traditional type for the person of our Lord has been strictly attended to by the most conscientious artists and in the best schools of Art — a tall, slender figure; a face of a long oval ; a broad, serene, elevated brow; a countenance mild, melancholy, majestic; the hair (“ of the color of wine or wine lees ” — which may mean either a dark rich brown or a golden yellow — both have been adopted) parted in the front, and flowing down on each side ; the beard parted. The resemblance to his mother — his only earthly parent — was strongly insisted upon by the early ecclesi- astical writers and attended to by the earliest painters, which has given something peculiarly refined and even feminine to the most ancient heads of our Saviour. The most ancient representations of the Virgin Mary now remaining are the sculptures on the ancient Christian sar- cophagi, about the third and fourth centuries, and a mosaic in the chapel of San Venanzio at Rome, referred by antiquarians to the seventh century.1 Here she is represented as a colossal figure majestically draped, standing with the arms outspread (the ancient attitude of prayer), and her eyes raised to heaven; then, after the seventh century, succeeded her image 'in her maternal character, seated on a throne with the infant Saviour in her arms. We must bear in mind, once for all, that from the earliest ages of Christianity the Virgin-mother of our Lord has been selected as the allegorical type of Religion in the abstract sense ; and to this, her symbolical character, must be referred those representations of later times, in which she ap- pears as trampling on the Dragon; as folding her votaries within the skirts of her ample robe ; as interceding for sinners ; as crowned between heaven and earth by the Father and the Son. 1 [For engravings of these early representations of the Virgin, see Legends of the Madonna, pp. 8, 9, and 65.]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24877888_0037.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
