Full text: Hare, Augustus J. C.: Florence

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.
	        
Waiting...

Note to user

Dear user,

In response to current developments in the web technology used by the Goobi viewer, the software no longer supports your browser.

Please use one of the following browsers to display this page correctly.

Thank you.

powered by Goobi viewer