Legends of the monastic orders as represented in the fine arts : Forming the second series of Sacred and legendary art / by Mrs. Jameson.

  • Jameson, Mrs. (Anna), 1794-1860.
Date:
1872
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Legends of the monastic orders as represented in the fine arts : Forming the second series of Sacred and legendary art / by Mrs. Jameson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    still represent to us the Christian ideal of womanhood in its purity and its power. The image might be defective, but to our forefathers it became gracious and sanctified through the suggestion, at least of all they could conceive of holiest, brightest, and best; the lesson conveyed, either by direct example or pictured parable, was always intelligible, and, in the hands of great and sincere artists, irresistibly impressive and attractive. To us, therefore, in these later times, such representations are worthy of reverent study for the sake of their own beauty, or for the sake of the spirit of love and faith in which they were created. Can the same be said of the monastic personages, and the legends relating to them, as we find them portrayed in sculpture and paint- ing ? I think not. It appears to me that, here, the pleasure and the interest are of a more mingled nature, good and ill together. At the very outset we are shocked by what seems a violation of the first principles of Art. Monachism is not the consecration of the beau- tiful, even in idea; it is the apotheosis of deformity and suffering. What can be more unpromising, as subjects for the artist, than the religious Orders of the Middle Ages, where the first thing demanded has been the absence of beauty and the absence of colour? Ascetic faces, attenuated forms, dingy dark draperies, the mean, the squalid, the repulsive, the absolutely painful,—these seem most uncongenial materials, out of which to evolve the poetic, the graceful, and the elevating! True, this has been done, and done in some cases so effectually, that we meet constantly with those whose per- ceptions have become confused, whose taste is in danger of being vitiated through the conventional associations awakened by the present passion for what is called Mediieval Art. But with all our just admiration and sjmipathy for greatness achieved through the inspiration of faith and feeling in spite of imperfect means and imperfect knowledge, let us not confound things which, in their very essence, are incompatible. Pain is pain; ugliness is ugliness; the quaint is not the graceful. Therefore, dear friends, be not deceived ! —every long-limbed, long-eyed, long-c\raped saint is not ‘ a Giotto nor every meagre simpering nun, or woe-begone monk, ‘ a Beato Angelico.’ And again : the effigies of the monastic personages do not only fail, and necessarily fail, in beauty ;—they have a deeper fault. Gene- rally speaking, the moral effect of such pictures upon the mass of the people was not, at any time, of a healthy kind. The subjects were