Memoirs of the early Italian painters / by Anna Jameson; thoroughly revised and in part rewritten by Estelle M. Hurll.

  • Anna Brownell Jameson
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

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.

    38/335 page 4
    In the same mariner traditional heads of St. Peter and St. Paul, rudely sketched, became in after times the groundwork of the highest dignity and beauty, still retaining that peculiar- ity of form and character which time and long custom had con- secrated in the eyes of the devout. Besides the representations of Christ and the Virgin, some of the characters and incidents of the Old Testament were selected as pictures, generally with reference to corresponding characters and incidents in the Gospel; thus St. Augustine, in the latter half of the fourth century, tells us that “ Abra- ham offering up his son Isaac ” was then a common subject, typical, of course, of the Great Sacrifice of the Son of God ; “ Moses striking the rock,” the Gospel or the Water of Life; the vine or grapes expressed the sacrament of the Eucharist; Jonah swallowed by the whale and then disgorged signified Death and Resurrection ; Daniel in the lions’ den signified Redemption, etc. This system of corresponding subjects, of type and antitype, was afterwards, as we shall see, carried much farther. In the seventh century, painting, as it existed in Europe, may be divided into two great schools or styles, — the Western, or Roman, of which the central point was Rome, and which was distinguished, amid great rudeness of execution, by a cer- tain dignity of expression and solemnity of feeling ; and the Eastern, or Byzantine school, of which Constantinople was the headquarters, and which was distinguished by greater mechani- cal skill, by adherence to the old classical forms, by the use of gilding, and by the mean, vapid, spiritless conception of motive and character. Erom the fifth to the ninth century the most important and interesting remains of pictorial Art are the mosaics in the churches,1 and the miniature paintings with which the MS. Bibles and Gospels were decorated. But during the tenth and eleventh centuries Italy fell into a state of complete barbarism and confusion, which almost ex- tinguished the practice of Art in any shape ; of this period only 1 Particularly those in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome, along the nave and over the principal arch, which date about the year 440 (those in the vault of the apsis are much later, about 1288); in the church of St. Cosmo and St. Damian at Rome, about the }Tear 520 ; in the church of San Vitale at Ravenna, about the years 527-565; and in the church of St. Cecilia at Rome, about the year 817,
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image