FLORENCE.
26
gentleness and innocent wonder, such as might be imagined in a rude
and lovely shepherd boy and no more. —Shelley.
2nd Corridor:
Left. Boy taking a thorn out of his foot—most beautiful, though
much restored.
Left. Minerva.
•Her face uplifted to Heaven is animated with a profound, sweet
and impassioned melancholy, with an earnest, fervid, and disinterested
pleading against some vast and inevitable wrong ; it is the joy and the
poetry of sorrow, making grief beautisul, and giving to that nameless
feeling which from the imperfection of language we call pain, but which
is not all pain, those feelings which make not only the possessor but the
spectator of it preser it to what is called pleasure, in which all is not
pleasure.— Shelley.
Right. Venus Anadyomena.
* She seems to have just issued from the bath, and yet to be animated
with the enjoyment of it. She seems all soft and mild enjoyment, and
the curved lines of her fine limbs flow into each other with never-ending
continuity of sweetness. Her face expresses a breathless yet passive
and innocent voluptuousness without affectation, without doubt ; it is
at once desire and enjoyment and the pleasure arising from both. .
Her form is indeed perfect. She is half sitting on and half rising from
a shell, and the fulness of her limbs, and their complete roundness
and perfection, do not diminish the vital energy with which they seem
to be embued. The attitude of her arms, which are lovely beyond
imagination, is natural, unaffected, and unforced. This perhaps is the
finest personification of Venus, the Deity of superficial desire, in all
antique statuary. —Shelley.
Amongst the best of the Pictures on the walls are :
2. Cimabue. S. Cecilia and the Story of her Life.
St. Cecilia is here quite unlike all our conventional ideas of the
youthful and beautiful patroness of music—a grand matronly figure
seated on a throne, holding in one hand the Gospel, in the other the
palm. The head-dress is a kind of veil ; the drapery, of a dark-blue,
which has turned greenish from age, is disposed with great breadth and
simplicity ; altogether it is as solemn and striking as an old mosaic.
The picture stood over the high-altar of her church, and round it are
eight small compartments representing scenes from her life ; the in¬
cidents selected being precisely those which were painted in the portico
of her church at Rome, and which in the time of Cimabue existed
entire. —Jameson’s Sacred Art,' ii. 590.
6. Giotto. The Garden of Gethsemane.—The donor kneels in the
corner.