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.
99/335 page 63
![Angelico are in harmony with this gentle, devout, enthusiastic spirit. They are not remarkable for the usual merits of the Florentine school: they are not addressed to the taste of con- noisseurs, but to the faith of worshippers. Correct drawing of the human figure could not be expected from one who regarded the exhibition of the undraped form as a sin; in the learned distribution of light and shade, in the careful imitation of nature in the details, and in variety of expression, many of his contemporaries excelled him; but none approached him in that poetical and religious fervor which he threw into his heads of saints and Madonnas. Power is not the character- istic of Angelico; wherever he has had to express energy of action, or bad or angry passions, he has generally failed. In his pictures of the Crucifixion and the Stoning of St. Stephen, the executioners and the rabble are feeble and often ill drawn, and his fallen angels and devils are anything but devilish; while, on the other hand, the pathos of suffering, of pity, of divine resignation — the expression of ecstatic faith and hope, or serene contemplation, have never been placed before us as in his pictures. In the heads of his young angels, in the purity and beatitude of his female saints, he has never been excelled — not even by Raphael. The principal works of Angelico are the frescoes in the church of his own convent of St. Mark at Florence; an ex- quisite reliquary or tabernacle, painted in miniature, in the sacristy of Santa Maria Novella; another large tabernacle of an enthroned Madonna in the Florence Gallery, in which the angels are surprising for their celestial grace; at Rome, the stories of St. Laurence and St. Stephen in the chapel of Nicholas V.1 In the Louvre is an altar-piece by him of sur- passing beauty. The subject is the Coronation of the Virgin Mary by her son the Redeemer, in the presence of saints and angels. It represents a throne under a rich Gothic canopy, to which there is an ascent by nine steps ; on the highest kneels the A irgin, veiled, her hands crossed on her bosom. She is clothed in a red tunic, a blue robe over it, and a royal mantle with a rich border flowing down behind. The features are most delicately lovely, and the expression of the face full 1 [The frescoes of this chape! were engraved by Francesco Giangiacomo Romano: Le Pitture della Cappella di Niccolo V., Rome, 1810. Braun has photographed them in a series of fifteen pictures.]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24877888_0099.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
