It is the school of genre, and employs itself
mainly with "painted idylls," but, in the production of this pictorial
poetry, exercises a wonderful tact in the selecting of such matter as
lends itself most readily and entirely to pictorial form, to complete
expression by drawing and colour. For although its productions are
painted poems, they belong to a sort of poetry which tells itself
without an articulated story. The master is pre-eminent for the
resolution, the ease and quickness, with which he reproduces
instantaneous motion--the lacing-on of armour, with the head bent back
so stately--the fainting lady--the embrace, rapid as the kiss caught,
with death itself, from dying lips--the momentary conjunction of mirrors
and polished armour and still water, by which all the sides of a solid
image are presented at once, solving that casuistical question whether
painting can present an object as completely as sculpture. The sudden
act, the rapid transition of thought, the passing expression--this he
arrests with that vivacity which Vasari has attributed to him, il fuoco
Giorgionesco, as he terms it.
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