. Fifty years of modern painting, Corot to Sargent . all the long list of subjectssuch as How They Met Themselves—two lovers faced by theirown apparitions—Mona Rosa, The Loving Gup, Mariana,Veronica Veronese, Fiammetta, Lilith, and many Blessed Damozel, both in the poem and in the picture,carries the love that is but personal attachment—Vegoisme adeux personnes, in the French phrase—beyond the grave;Astarte Syriaca recreates the goddess who, in old-time belief,delighted in such love. Rarely does he appeal to anythinghigher than the sensuous emotion. It intrudes even whenJoan of Arc
. Fifty years of modern painting, Corot to Sargent . all the long list of subjectssuch as How They Met Themselves—two lovers faced by theirown apparitions—Mona Rosa, The Loving Gup, Mariana,Veronica Veronese, Fiammetta, Lilith, and many Blessed Damozel, both in the poem and in the picture,carries the love that is but personal attachment—Vegoisme adeux personnes, in the French phrase—beyond the grave;Astarte Syriaca recreates the goddess who, in old-time belief,delighted in such love. Rarely does he appeal to anythinghigher than the sensuous emotion. It intrudes even whenJoan of Arc is kissing the sword of deliverance. Of thelove that endures in higher love—that is wholly disinterested,has no return on self—he rarely gives a hint. Such asweetly simple picture as Joli Coeur seems almost out ofplace amongst so many in which not kind-heartedness, butthe love that does little more than seek self in another,gazes out upon us from a world of luxurious , in his pictures, has interpreted, almost exclusively,. BEATA BEATRIX DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI THE COURSE OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM 173 one phase of love, and that not the highest; so that, had wehim alone for guide, we might take this fragment for thewhole. The generous emotions for which we use such wordsas devotion, charity—in the large sense—unselfishness, arenot suggested by his pictures. Though there is no dallyingwith evil, yet the word purity never comes to our lips,as it inevitably does when we look at Holman HuntsIsabella, while we are before any but his earliest works •nor do we find ourselves thinking of character and does not stand before us clear from, or nobly dominatingsense. If the faces of the vast majority of living womendid not say things that the faces in Rossettis pictures rarely,if ever, say, it would go ill with mankind. The picture here reproduced, Beata Beatrix, though animaginative work of great power and beauty—it was thewitness of his art to his
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