Certainly, it cannot be said of Angelico's fresco that
it throws into a sensible form our highest thoughts about man and his
relation to the world; but it did not do this adequately even for
Angelico. For him, all that is outward or sensible in his work--the hair
like wool, the rosy nimbus, the crown of pearl--is only the symbol or
type of an inexpressible world, to which he wishes to direct the
thoughts; he would have shrunk from the notion that what the eye
apprehended was all. Such forms of art, then, are inadequate to the
matter they clothe; they remain ever below its level. Something of this
kind is true also of oriental art. As in the middle age from an
exaggerated inwardness, so in the East from a vagueness, a want of
definition, in thought, the matter presented to art is unmanageable:
forms of sense struggle vainly with it. The many-headed gods of the East,
the orientalised Diana of Ephesus, with its numerous breasts, like
Angelico's fresco, are at best overcharged symbols, a means of hinting at
an idea which art cannot adequately express, which still remains in the
world of shadows.
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