History of art . Ambrogio , detail. The Pope and the Franciscans,{San Francesco, Siena.) remains engulfed in the Byzantium which, be it said,he animates with an expressiveness of great powerand charm. He has, to the highest degree, the gift ofgiving life and movement to his crowds. They areactive and busy, without great actions, but with amovement in the ensemble that clearly reveals themeaning of the scene at our first glance. He has butthe slightest intuition of that sublime compositionwhich, with the great Florentine, is no other than a THE MISSION OF FRANCIS OF ASSISI 425
History of art . Ambrogio , detail. The Pope and the Franciscans,{San Francesco, Siena.) remains engulfed in the Byzantium which, be it said,he animates with an expressiveness of great powerand charm. He has, to the highest degree, the gift ofgiving life and movement to his crowds. They areactive and busy, without great actions, but with amovement in the ensemble that clearly reveals themeaning of the scene at our first glance. He has butthe slightest intuition of that sublime compositionwhich, with the great Florentine, is no other than a THE MISSION OF FRANCIS OF ASSISI 425 perfect balance between the moral element and thedescriptive element. But he goes straight to his goalof relating the emotion aroused in him by the life anddeath of the Lord, and he expresses his ideas in livingforms; his speech is marked by nobility, tenderness,verve, and archness, even when he is impassioned, and. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Landscape, fresco. {Academy, Siena.) in these qualities he has scarcely a superior throughoutthe whole of Italian painting, save Giotto immediate successors, Barna, for example, make amelodramatic travesty, though an ardent and highlycolored one, of this power for passion which wouldsuffice to define, outside of the genius of Giotto, thegenius of Italy itself. All her heroes have possessedthis dramatic soul, and for five centuries all her falseartists have shamelessly used it to calumniate, beforethe eyes of men, the ideal that she has poured forth sogenerously. Barna and Spinello Aretino disfigure the 28 426 MEDIAEVAL ART death struggle of the Middle Ages of the Latin world,as the Bolognese school was later on to disfigure thedeath struggle of the Latin Renaissance by turninginto theatrical declamation the spiritual realities thathad been wrested from the unknown by Masaccio, DaVinci, Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Titian. And yet in this retrograde cit
Size: 1934px × 1292px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., boo, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1920, booksubjectart, bookyear1921
