And here ends the battle for the liberation of modern art.Libertas artibus restituta.The painters of the nineteenth century are no longer imitators, but have become makers of a new thing, “enlargers of the empire.” The prophetic words written in the beginning of the nineteenth century by the Hamburger, Philipp Otto Runge, “light, colour, and moving life,” were to form the great problem, the great conquest of modern art; they were fulfilled after two generations. Through the Impressionists art was enriched by an opulence of new beauties. A new and independent style had been discovered for the representation of new things, and a new province—a province peculiar to herself—was won for painting.
CHAPTER XXXII
THE NEW IDEALISM IN ENGLAND
Theflood of Impressionism was at the same time crossed by another current. Impressionism was a phase of progressive art of world-wide influence. It proclaimed that nature and life were the inexhaustible mine of beauty. Then after Naturalism had taught artists to work upon the impressions of external reality in an independent manner, a transition was made by some who embodied the impressions of their inward spirit in a free creative fashion, unborrowed from the old masters.
We feel the need of living not merely in the world around us, but in an inner world that we build up ourselves, a world far more strange and fair, far more luminous than that in which our feet stumble so helplessly. We must needs mount upon the pinions of fancy into the wide land of vision, build castles in the clouds, watch their rise and their fall, and follow into misty distance the freaks of their changing architecture. The more grey and colourless the present may be, the more alluringly does the fairy splendour of vanished worlds of beauty flit before us. It is the very banality of everyday life that renders us more sensitive to the delicate charm of old myths, and we receive them in a more childlike, impressionable way than any earlier age, for we look upon them with fresh eyes that have been rendered keen by yearning.
From all this it is evident that Impressionism could not remain the mode of expression for the whole world of the present day. The longing for old-world romance would brook no refusal. It was demanded from art not that she should mirror nature, nature could be seen without her aid, but that she should carry us away on dream-wings to a distant world more beautiful than our own; not that she should be merely modern, but that she should afford us even to-day some reflection of that beauty which sheds forth its lustre from the works of the old masters.
This yearning after far-off worlds of beauty was combined with a demand for new delights of colour. The Impressionists had centred every effort in compassing the most difficult elements of the world of phenomena—light, air, and colour—ending in extreme imitation of reality. Then came a desire for colours, more radiant, more vivid than ever was seen on this poor world of ours; and since hardly any of the younger generation fulfilled the desire of the modern longing, the standard of a bygone age was raisedaloft, and there set in the anti-naturalistic, anti-modern current that still survived from the age of romance in the work-a-day world of the present.
How was it possible that England should have taken the lead upon this occasion also? Can an Englishman, a matter-of-fact being who finds his happiness in comfort and a practical sphere of action, be at the same time a Romanticist? Is not London the most modern town in Europe? Yet, without a question, this is the very reason why the New Romanticism found its earliest expression there, although it was the place where Naturalism had reigned longest and with the greatest strictness. There was a reaction against the prose of everyday life, just as, in the earlier part of the century, English landscape painting had been a reaction against town life. To escape the whistle of locomotives and the restless bustle of the struggle for existence, men take refuge in a far-off world, a world where everything is fair and graceful, and all emotions tender and noble, a world where no rudeness, no discord, and nothing fierce or brutal disturbs the harmony of ideal perfection. These artists become revellers in a land of fantasy, and flee from reality to an inner life which they have created for themselves, wander from London’s railways and fogs to the sunny Italy of Botticelli, take their rest in the land of poetry, and come back with packing-cases full of lovely pictures and hearts full of happy emotions.
Moreover, they find in the primitive artists that simplicity which is most refreshing of all to overstrained spirits. Having produced Byron, Shelley, and Turner, the English were artisticgourmets, sated with all enjoyments in the realms of the intellect, and they now meditated works through which yet a new thrill of beauty might pass through the imagination. In the primitive masters they discovered all the qualities which had vanished from art since the sixteenth century—inofficious purity, innocent and touching Naturalism, antiquated austerity, and an enchanting depth of feeling. Jaded with other experiences, they admired in those naïve spirits the capacity for ecstatic rapture and vision—in other words, for the highest gratification. If one could but have in this nineteenth century such feelings as were known to Dante, the gloomy Florentine; Botticelli, the great Jeremiah of the Renaissance; or the tender mystic Fra Angelico! Surfeited with modernity, and endowed with nerves of acute refinement, artists went back in their fancy to this luxuriously blissful condition, and finally came to the point at which modernity was transformed once more into childish babble and the unbelieving materialism of the present age into a mystical and romantic union with the old currents of emotion.
Under the influence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti English pre-Raphaelitism now entered upon a new and entirely different phase.
Although Rossetti was the soul of the earlier movement, he was a man whose temperament was even then essentially different from that of his comrades Millais and Hunt, who founded the Brotherhood with him in 1848. Even the two works which he exhibited with them in 1849 and 1850 makeone feel the great gulf which lay between him and them. In the former year, when Hunt was represented by his “Rienzi,” and Millais by his “Lorenzo and Isabella,” Rossetti produced his “Girlhood of Mary Virgin.” In the following, when Hunt painted “The Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Missionary” and Millais “The Child Jesus in the Workshop of Joseph the Carpenter,” Rossetti came forward with his “Ecce Ancilla Domini.” “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin” was a little picture of austere simplicity and ascetic character; it was intentionally angular in drawing, and possessed a certain archaic bloom. The Virgin, clad in grey garments, sits at a curiously shaped frame embroidering a lily with gold threads upon a red ground. The flower she is copying stands before her in a vase, and a little angel, with roseate wings, is watering it with an air of abashed reverence. St. Anne is busy by the side of the Virgin—both being, respectively, portraits of the artist’s mother and sister—and in the background St. Joachim is binding a vine to a trellis. And several Latin books are lying upon the floor. The second work, “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” is the familiar picture which is now in the National Gallery—a harmony of white upon white of indescribable graciousness and delicacy. Mary, a bashful, meditative, and childlike maiden, in a white garment, is shown in a half-kneeling attitude upon a white bed. The walls of the chamber are white, and in front of her there stands a frame at which she has been working; and a piece of embroidery, with a lily which she has begun, hangs over it. Before her stands the angel with flame rising from his feet, in solemn, peaceful gravity, as he extends towards her the stalk of the lily which he holds. A dove flies gently in through the window. Now, in spite of their romantic subjects the work of Hunt and Millais is lucid and temperate, while Rossetti is dreamily mystical. The two former were straightforward, true, and natural, whereas the simplicity of the latter was subtilised and consciously affected. It was due to the vibrating delicacy of his distempered, seething imagination that he was able to give himself a deceptive appearance of being a primitive artist. The creative power of the two former is an earnest power of the understanding, whereas in the latter there is a vague dreaminess, a tendency to luxuriate in his own moods, an efflorescence of tones and colours. In the one case there is anangular but single-minded study of nature; in the other there is the demureness and embarrassment of the Quattrocento, a demureness breaking into blossom, and an embarrassment full of charm—a romanticism which cherished the yearning for repose in the childlike and innocent Middle Ages, and clothed it with all the attractions of mysticism. Holman Hunt, Madox Brown, and Millais were realists in their drawing, men who wanted to represent objects with all possible accuracy, to be faithful in rendering the finest fibre of a petal and every thread in a fabric. Rossetti’s picture was a symphonic ode in pigments, and he himself was one of the earliest of the modern lyricists of colour. This distinction became wider and wider with the course of time, and as early as 1858 he found himself deserted by his earlier comrades. Madox Brown, Holman Hunt, and especially Millais, in their further development, tended more and more to become Naturalists, and were finally led to completely realistic subjects from the immediate present by the inviolable fidelity with which they studied nature. On the other hand, Rossetti became the centre of a new circle of artists, who directed the current of what was originally Naturalism more and more into mysticism and refined archaism.
In 1856The Oxford and Cambridge Magazinewas founded as a monthly periodical. There were several contributions by Rossetti, and in this way he became so well known in Oxford that the Union accepted an offer from him to execute a series of wall-paintings. Accordingly he painted several pictures from the Arthurian legends, making the sketches for them himself, and employing for their elaboration a number of young men, some of them amateur artists and students at the University. In this way he came into connection with Arthur Hughes, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones. These artists, afterwards joined by Spencer Stanhope and Walter Crane, both of them younger men, became—with George Frederick Watts at their flank—the leading members of the new brotherhood, the representatives of that New pre-Raphaelitism in which interest is still centred in England.
Their art is a kind of Italian Renaissance upon English soil. The romantic chord which vibrates in old English poetry is united to the grace and purity of Italian taste, the classical lucidity of the Pagan mythology with Catholic mysticism, and the most modern riot of emotion with the demure vesture of the primitive Florentines. Through this mixture of heterogeneous elements English New Idealism is probably the most remarkable form of art upon which the sun has ever shone: borrowed and yet in the highest degree personal, it is an art combining an almost childlike simplicity of feeling with a morbidhautgoût, the most attentive and intelligent study of the old masters with free, creative, modern imagination, the most graceful sureness of drawing and the most sparkling individuality of colour with a helpless, stammering accent introduced of set purpose. The old Quattrocentisti wander amongst the real Italian flowers; but with the New pre-Raphaelites one enters a hot-house: one is met by a soft damp heat, bright exotic flowers exhale an overpowering fragrance, juicy fruits catch the eye, and slender palms, through the branches of which no rough wind may bluster, gently sway their long, broad fans.
Professor Lombroso would certainly find the material for ingenious disquisition in Rossetti, who introduced this Italian phase, and himself came of an Italian stock. And it might almost seem as if a soul from those old times had found its reincarnation in the lonely painter who lived at Chelsea, though it was a soul who no longer bore heaven in his heart like Fra Angelico. In his whole being he seems like a phenomenon of atavism, like a citizen of that long-buried Italy who, after many transmigrations, had strayed into the misty North, to the bank of the Thames, and from thence looked in his home-sickness ever towards the South, enveloped in poetry and glowing in the sun.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a Catholic and an Italian. Amid his English surroundings he kept the feelings of one of Latin race. His father, the patriot and commentator upon Dante, had originally lived in Naples, and inflamed the popular party there by his passionate writings. In consequence of the active part which he took in political agitation he lost his post at the Bourbon Museum, escapedfrom Italy upon a warship, disguised as an English officer, settled in London in 1824, and married Francesca Polidori, the daughter of a secretary of Count Alfieri. Here he became Professor of the Italian language at King’s College, and published several works on Dante, the most important of which,Dante’s Beatrice, written in 1852, once more supported the theory that Beatrice was not a real person. Dante Gabriel, the son of this Dante student Gabriele Rossetti, was born in London on 12th May 1828. The whole family actively contributed to scholarship and poetry. His elder sister, Maria Francesca, was the authoress ofA Shadow of Dante, a work which gives a most valuable explanation of the scheme ofThe Divine Comedy; his younger sister, Christina, was one of the most eminent poetesses of England; and his brother, William Michael Rossetti, is well known as an art-critic and a student of Shelley. Even from early youth Dante Gabriel Rossetti was familiar with the world of Dante, and brought up in the worship of Dante’s wonderful age and an enthusiasm for his mystic and transcendental poetry. He knew Dante by heart, and Guido Cavalcanti. The mystical poet became his guide through life, and led him to Fra Angelico, the mystic of painting. Indeed, the world of Dante and of the painters antecedent to Raphael is his spiritual home.
He was barely eighteen when he became a pupil at the Royal Academy, studying a couple of years later under Madox Brown, who was not many years older than himself. Even then Rossetti had an almost mesmeric influence upon his friends. He was a pale, tall, thin young man, who always walked with a slight stoop; reserved, dry in his manner, and careless in dress, there was nothing captivating about him at a transitory meeting. But his pale face was lit up by his unusually reflective, deeply clouded, contemplative eyes; and about his defiant mouth there played that contempt of the profane crowd which is natural to a superior mind, while the laurel of fame was already twined about his youthful forehead. In 1849, when he was exhibiting his earliest picture, he had published inThe Germ, to say nothing of his numerous poems, a mystical, visionary, sketch in prose namedHand and Soul, which was much praised by men of the highest intellect in London. Soon afterwards he published a volume entitledDante and his Circle, in which he translated a number of old Italian poems, and rendered Dante’sVita Nuovainto strictly archaic English prose. Reserved as he was towards strangers, he was irresistibly attractive to his friends, and his brilliant, genial conversation won him the goodwill of every one. A man of gifted and delicate nature, sensitive to an extreme degree, a sedentary student who had yet an enthusiasm for knightly deeds, a jaded spirit capable of morbidly heightened, exotic sensibility and soft, melting reverie, one whose overstrained nerves only vibrated if he slept in the daytime and worked at night, it seemed as though Rossetti was born to be the father of thedécadence, of that state of spirit which every one now perceives to be flooding Europe.
His later career was as quiet as its opening had been brilliant. After that graciously sentimental little picture, “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” Rossetti exhibited in public only once again; this was in 1856. From that date the public saw no more of his painting. He worked only for his friends and the friends of his friends. He was famous only in private, and looked up to like a god within a narrow circle of admirers. One of his acquaintances, the painter Deverell, had introduced him in 1850 to the woman who became for him what Saskia Uylenburgh had been for Rembrandt and Helene Fourment for Rubens—his type of feminine beauty. She was a young dressmaker’s assistant, Miss Eleanor Siddal. Her thick, heavy hair was fair, with that faint reddish tint in it which Titian painted; it grew in two tapering bands deep down into the neck, being there somewhat fairer than it was above, and it curled thickly. Her eyes had something indefinite in their expression; nothing, however, that was dreamy, mobile, and changeable, for they seemed rather to be insuperable, fathomless, and unnaturally vivid. All the play of her countenance lay in the lower part of her face, in the nostrils,mouth, and chin. The mouth, indeed, with its deep corners, sharply chiselled outlines, and lips triumphantly curved, was particularly expressive. And her tall, slender figure had a refined distinction of line. In 1860 they married. Some of his most beautiful works were painted during this epoch—the “Beata Beatrix,” the “Sibylla Palmifera,” “Monna Vanna,” “Venus Verticordia,” “Lady Lilith,” and “The Beloved”—pictures which he painted without a thought of exhibition or success. After a union of barely two years this passionately loved woman died, shortly after the birth of a still-born child. He laid a whole volume of manuscript poems—many of them inspired by her—in the coffin, and they were buried with her. From that time he lived solitary and secluded from the world, surrounded by mediæval antiques, in his old-fashioned house at Chelsea, entirely given up to his dreams, a stranger in a world without light. He suffered much from ill-health, and was sensitive and hypochondriacal, and, indeed, undermined his health by an immoderate use of chloral. His friends entreated him to bring out his poems, and all England was expectant when Rossetti at length yielded to pressure, opened the grave of his wife, and took out the manuscript. The poems appeared in the April of 1870. The first edition was bought up in ten days, and there followed six others. Wherever he appeared he was honoured like a god. But the attacks directed against the first pictures of the pre-Raphaelites were repeated, although now transferred to another region. A pseudonymous article by Robert Buchanan in theContemporary Review, and published afterwards as a pamphlet, entitledThe Fleshly School of Poetry, accused Rossetti of immorality and imitation of Baudelaire and the Marquis de Sade. Rossetti stepped once more into the arena, and replied by a letter in theAthenæumheadedThe Stealthy School of Criticism. From that time he shut himself up completely, never went out, and led “the hole-and-cornerest existence.”
In 1881 he published a second volume of poems, chiefly composed of ballads and sonnets. A year afterwards, on 10th April 1882, he died, honoured, even in the academical circles in which he never mingled, as one of the greatest men in England. The exhibition of his works which was opened a couple of months after his death created an immense sensation. Those of his pictures which had not been already sold straight from the easel were paid for with their weight in gold, and are now scattered in great English country mansions and certain private galleries in Florence. The only very rich collection in London is that of an intimate friend of the artist, the late Mr. Leyland, who had gathered together, in his splendid house in the West End, probably the most beautiful work of which the East can boast in carpets and vases, or the early Renaissance in intaglios, small bronzes, and ornaments. Here, surrounded by the quaint and delicate pictures of Carlo Crivelli and Botticelli, Rossetti was in the society of his contemporaries.
His range of subject was not wide. In his earliest period he had a fancy for painting small biblical pictures, of which “Ecce Ancilla Domini” is the best known, and the delightfully archaic “Girlhood of Mary Virgin” one of the most beautiful. But this austerely biblical tendency was not of long continuance. It soon gave way to a brilliant, imaginative Romanticism, to which he was prompted by Dante. “Giotto painting the Portrait of Dante,” “The Salutation of Beatrice on Earth and in Eden” (from theVita Nuova), “La Pia” (from thePurgatorio), the “Beata Beatrix,” and “Dante’s Dream,” in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, are the leading works which arose under the influence of the great Italian. The head of his wife, with her heavily veiled eyes, and Giotto’s well-known picture of Dante, sufficed him for the creation of the most tender, mystical poems, which, at the same time, show him in all the splendour of his wealth of colour. He revels in the most brilliant hues; his pictures have the appearance of being bathed in a glow; and there is something deeply sensuous in his vivid and lustrous green, red, and violet tones. In the picture “Dante on the Anniversary of Beatrice’s Death” the poet kneels at the open window which looks out upon Florence; he has been drawing, and a tablet is in his hand. The room is quite simple, a frieze with angels’ heads being its only ornament. Visitors of rank have come to see him—an elderly magnate and his daughter—and have stood long behind him without his noticing their presence; for he has been thinking of Beatrice, and it is only when his attention is attracted to them by a friend that he turns round at last. The “Beata Beatrix,” in the National Gallery in London—a picture begun in 1863 and ended in the August of 1866—treats of the death of Beatrice “under the semblance of a trance, in which Beatrice, seated in a balcony overlooking the city, is suddenly rapt from earth to heaven.” In accordance with the description in theVitaNuova, Beatrice sits in the balcony of her father’s palace in strange ecstasy. Across the parapet of the balcony there is a view of the Arno and of that other palace where Dante passed his youth close to his adored mistress, until the unforgotten 9th of June 1290, when death robbed him of her. A peaceful evening light is shed upon the bank of the Arno, and plays upon the parapet with warm silvery beams. Beatrice is dressed in a garment belonging to no definite epoch, of green and rosy red, the colours of Love and Hope. Her head rises against a little patch of yellow sky between the two palaces, and seems to be surrounded by it as by a halo. She is in a trance, has the foreknowledge of her approaching death, and already lives through the spirit in another world, whilst her body is still upon the earth. Her hands are touched by a heavenly light. A dove of deep rose-coloured plumage alights upon her knees, bringing her a white poppy; whilst opposite, before the palace of Dante, the figure of Love stands, holding a flaming heart, and announcing to the poet that Beatrice has passed to a life beyond the earth.
“La Donna Finestra,” painted in 1879, and to be counted amongst his ripest creations, has connection with that passage in theVita Nuovawhere Dante sinks to the ground overcome with sorrow for Beatrice’s death, and is regarded with sympathy by a lady looking down from a window, the Lady of Pity, the human embodiment of compassion. “Dante’s Dream” is probably the work which shows the painter at his zenith. The expression of the heads is profound and lofty, the composition severely mediæval and admirably complete; and although the painting is laboured, the total impression is nevertheless so cogent that it is impossible to forget it. “The scene,” in Rossetti’s own description, “is a chamber of dreams, strewn with poppies, where Beatrice is seen lying on a couch, as if just fallen back in death; the winged figure of Love carries his arrow pointed at the dreamer’s heart, and with it a branch of apple-blossom; as he reaches the bier, Love bends for a moment over Beatrice with the kiss which her lover has never given her; while the two green-clad dream-ladies hold the pall full of May-blossom suspended for an instant before it covers her face for ever.” The expression of ecstasy in Dante’s face, and the still, angelical sweetness of Beatrice, are rendered with astonishing intensity. She lies upon the bier, pale as a flower, wrapped in a white shroud, with her lips parted as though she were gently breathing, and seems not dead but fallen asleep. Her fair hair floats round her in golden waves. In its vague folds the covering of the couch displays the marble outlines of the body: and a look of bliss rests upon the pure and clear-cut features of her lovely face.
This “painting of the soul” occupied Rossetti almost exclusively in the third and most fruitful period of his life, when he painted hardly any pictures upon the larger scale, but separate feminine figures furnished with various poetic attributes, the deeper meaning of which is interpreted in his poems. “The Sphinx,” in which he busied himself with the great riddle of life, is the only one containing several figures. Three persons—a youth, a man of ripe years, and a grey-beard—visit the secret dwelling of the Sphinx to inquire their destiny of this omniscient being. It is only the man who really puts the question; the grey-beard stumbles painfully towards her cavern, while the young man, wearied with his journey, falls dying to the earth before the very object of his quest. The Sphinx remains in impenetrable silence, with her green, inscrutable, mysterious eyes coldly and pitilessly fixed upon infinity. “The Blessed Damozel,” “Proserpina,” “Fiammetta,” “The Daydream,” “La Bella Mano,” “La Ghirlandata,” “Veronica Veronese,” “Dis Manibus,” “Astarte Syriaca” are all separate figures dedicated to the memory of his wife. As Dante immortalised his Beatrice, Rossetti honoured his wife, who died so early, in his poems and his pictures. He painted her as “The Blessed Damozel,” with her gentle, saint-like face, her quiet mouth, her flowing golden hair and peaceful lids. He represents her asan angel of God standing at the gate of Heaven, looking down upon the earth. She is thinking of her lover, and of the time when she will see him again in heaven, and of the sacred songs that will be sung to him. Lilies rest upon her arm, and lovers once more united hover around.
There is no action or rhetoric of gesture in Rossetti. His tall Gothic figures are motionless and silent, having almost the floating appearance of visionary figures which stand long before the gaze of the dreamer without taking bodily form. They glide along like phantoms and shadows, like the undulations of a blossom-laden tree or a field of corn waving in the wind. They neither talk nor weep nor laugh, and are only eloquent through their quiet hands, the most sensuous and the most spiritual hands ever painted, or with their eyes, the most dreamy and fascinating eyes which have been rendered in art since Leonardo da Vinci. In the pictures which Rossetti devoted to her, Eleanor Siddal is a marvellously lofty woman, glorified in the mysticism of a rare beauty. Rossetti drapes his idol in Venetian fashion, with rich garments which recall Giorgione in the character of their colour, and, like Botticelli, he strews flowers of deep fragrance around her, especiallyroses, which he painted with wonderful perfection and hyacinths, for which he had a great love, and the intoxicating perfume of which affected him greatly.
This taste for beautiful and deeply lustrous colours and rich accessories is, indeed, the one purely pictorial quality which this painter-poet has, if one understands by pictorial qualities the capacity for intoxicating one’s self with the beauty of the visible world. His drawing is often faulty; and his bodies, enveloped in rich and heavy garments, are, perhaps, not invariably in accordance with anatomy. What explains Rossetti’s fabulous success is purely the condition of spirit which went to the making of his works—that nervous vibration, that ecstasy of opium, that combination of suffering and sensuousness, and that romanticism drunk with beauty, which pervade his paintings. When they appeared they seemed like a revelation of a beautiful land, only one could not say where it existed—a revelation, indeed, for it revealed for the first time a world of story which was in no sense fabulous: there came a romanticism which was something real; a style arose which seemed as though it were woven of tones and colours, a style rioting in an everlasting exhilaration of spirit, breaking out sometimes in a glow of flame and sometimes in delicate, tremulous longing. Even where he paints a Madonna she is merely a woman in his eyes, and he endows her with the glowing fire of passionate fervour, with a trace of the joy of the earth, which no painter has ever given her before; and through this union of refined modern sensuousness and Catholic mysticism he has created a new thrill of beauty. His painting was a drop of a most precious essence, in its hues enchanting and intoxicating, the strongest spiritual potion ever brewed in English art. The intensity of his overstrained sensibility, and the wonderful Southern mosaic of form into which he poured this sensibility with elaborate refinement, make him seem own brother to Baudelaire.
This tendency of spirit was so novel, this plunge in the tide of mysticism so enchanting, this delicate, archaic fragrance so overwhelming, that a new stage in the culture of modern England dates from the appearance of Rossetti.He borrowed nothing from his contemporaries, and all borrowed from him. There came a time when budding girls in London attired themselves like early Italians from Dante’sInferno, when Jellaby Postlethwaite, in Du Maurier’s mocking skit, entered a restaurant at luncheon-time, and ordered a glass of water and placed in it a lily which he had brought with him. “What else can I bring?” asked the waiter. “Nothing,” he sighed; “that is all I need.” There began that æstheticism, that yearning for the lily and that cult of the sunflower, which Gilbert and Sullivan parodied inPatience. Swinburne, who has tasted of emotions of the most various realms of spirit, and in his poems set them before the world as though in marvellously chiselled goblets, represents this æsthetic phase of English art in literature. As a painter, Edward Burne-Jones—the greatest of that Oxford circle which gathered round Rossetti in 1856—began to work at the point where Rossetti left off.
Sir Edward Burne-Jones, who must now be spoken of, was born in Birmingham in August 1833, and was reading theology in Oxford when Rossetti was there painting the mural pictures for the Union. Rossetti attracted him as a flame attracts the moth. As yet he had not had any artistic training, but some of his drawings which were shown to Rossetti by a mutual friend revealed so much poetic force, in spite of their embarrassed method of expression, that the painter-poet entered into communication with him, and allowed him to paint in the Debating Room of the Union a subject from the Arthurian legends, “The Death of Merlin.” The picture met with approval, and Burne-Jones abandoned theology, became an intimate friend of Rossetti and the companion of his studies, and went with him to London. There he designed a number of church windows for Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and in 1864 exhibited his first picture, “The Merciful Knight.” Later there followed the triptych “Pyramus and Thisbe” and a picture called “The Evening Star,” a glimmering landscape through which a gentle spirit in a bronze-green garment is seen tofloat. But none of these works excited much attention. The small picture exhibited in 1870, “Phyllis and Demophoön,” was even thought offensive on account of the “sensuous expression” of the nymph. So Burne-Jones withdrew it, and for many years from that time held aloof from all the exhibitions of the Royal Academy. For seven years his name was never seen in a catalogue. It was only on 1st May 1877, at the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery—founded by Sir Coutts Lindsay, likewise a painter, to afford himself and his comrades a place of exhibition independent of the Academy—that Burne-Jones once more made his appearance before the eyes of the world. But his pictures, like those of Rossetti, had found their way in secrecy and by their own merit, and of a sudden he saw himself regarded as one of the most eminent painters in the country.
His art is the flower of most potent fragrance in English æstheticism, and the admiration accorded to him in England is almost greater than that which had been previously paid to Rossetti. The Grosvenor Gallery, where he exhibited his pictures at this period, was for a long time a kind of temple for the æsthetes. On the opening day men and women of the greatest refinement crowded before his works. There was a cult of Burne-Jones at the Grosvenor Gallery, as there is a cult of Wagner at Bayreuth. One had to work one’s way very gradually through the crowd to see his pictures, which always occupied the place of honour in the principal room of the gallery, and I remember how helplessly I stood in 1884 before the first of his pictures which I saw there.
In a kind of vestibule of early Gothic architecture there was seated in the foreground an armed man, who, in his dark, gleaming harness and his hard and bold profile, was like a Lombard warrior, say Mantegna’s Duke of Mantua, and as he mused he held in his hand aniron crown studded with jewels; farther in the background, upon a high marble throne, a maiden was seated, a young girl with reddish hair and a pale worn face, looking with steadfast eyes far out into another world, as though in a hypnotic trance. Two youths, apparently pages, sang, leaning upon a balustrade; while all manner of costly accessories, brilliant stuffs, lustrous marble, grey granite, and mosaic pavement, shining in green and red tones, lent the whole picture an air of exquisite richness. The title in the catalogue was “King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid,” and any one acquainted with Provençal poetry knew that King Cophetua, the hero of an old ballad, fell in love with a beggar-girl, offered her his crown, and married her. But this was not to be gathered from the picture itself, where all palpable illustration of the story was avoided. Nevertheless a vague sense of emotional disquietude was revealed in it. The two leading persons of the strange idyll, the earnest knight and the pallid maiden, are not yet able themselves to understand how all has come to pass—how she, the beggar-maid, should be upon the marble throne, and he, the king, kneeling on the steps before her whom he has exalted to be a queen. They remain motionless and profoundly silent, but their hearts are alive and throbbing. They have feeling which they cannot comprehend themselves, and the past and present surge through one another: life is a dream, and the dream is life.
Everything that Burne-Jones has created is at once fragrant, mystical, and austere, like this picture. His range of subject is most extensive. In hisPrincessAlfred Tennyson had quickened into new life the legends of chivalry, and in hisIdylls of the Kingthe tales of the Knights of the Holy Grail. Swinburne published hisAtalanta in Calydon, in which he exercised once more the mysterious spell of the ancient drama, while he created inChastelard,Bothwell, andMary Stuarta trilogy of the finest historical tragedies ever written, and showed inTristram of Lyonessethat even Tennyson had not exhausted all the beauty in old legends of the time of King Arthur; while, as early as 1866, he had given to the world hisPoems and Ballads, dedicated to Burne-Jones. Inthese works lie the ideas to which the painter has given form and colour.
He paints Circe in a saffron robe, preparing the potion to enchant the companions of Ulysses, with a strange light in her orbs, while two panthers fawn at her feet. He represents the goddess of Discord at the marriage-feast of Thetis, a ghastly, pallid figure, entering amongst the gods who are celebrating the occasion, and holding the fateful apple in her hand. He depicts Pygmalion, the artist King of Cyprus, supplicating Aphrodite to breathe life into the sculptured image of a maiden, the work of his own hands.
Apart from classical antiquity, he owes some of his inspiration to the Bible and Christian legends, the sublimity of their grave tragedies, and the troubled sadness of their yearning and exaltation. One of his leading works devotes six pictures to the days of creation. An angel—accompanied in every case by the angels of the previous days—carries a sphere, in which may be seen the stars, the waters, the trees, the animals, and the first man and woman, in their proper sequence. The scene of the “Adoration of the Kings” is a landscape where fragrant roses bloom in the shadow of the slender stems of trees, which rise straight as a bolt.The Virgin sits in their midst calm and unapproachable, and in her lap the Child, who is more slender than in the pictures of Cimabue. The three Wise Men—tall, gigantic figures, clad in rich mediæval garments—approach softly, whilst an angel floats perpendicularly in the air as a silent witness.
In his picture “The Annunciation” Mary is standing motionless beside the great basin of a well-spring, at the portico of her house. To the left the messenger of God appears in the air. He has floated solemnly down, and it seems as if the folds of his robes, which fall straight from the body, had hardly been ruffled in his flight, as if his wings had scarcely moved; with the extremities of his feet he touches the branches of a laurel. Mary does not shrink, and makes no gesture. There they stand, gravely, and as still as statues. The robe of the angel is white, and white that of the Virgin, and white the marble floor and the wainscoting of the house; and it is only the pinions of the heavenly messenger that gleam in a golden brightness. A picture called “Sponsa die Libano” bore as a motto the words fromThe Song of Solomon: “Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out.” The bride, in an ample blue robe, walks musing beside a stream, upon the bank of which white lilies grow, whilst the vehement figures of the North and South Winds rush through the air in grey, fluttering garments.
In addition to his love for Homer and the Bible, Burne-Jones has a passion for the old Trouvères of theChansons de Geste, the great and fanciful adventures of vanished chivalry, Provençal courts of love, and the legends of Arthur, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table. His “Chant d’Amour” is like a page torn out of an old English or Provençal tale. On the meadow before a mediæval town a lady is kneeling, a sort of St. Cecilia, in a white upper-garment and a gleaming skirt, playing upon an organ, the full chords of which echo softly through the evening landscape. To the left a young knight is sitting upon the ground, and silently listens, lost in the music, while a strange figure, clad in red, is pressing upon the bellows of the instrument. “The Enchantment of Merlin,” with which he made his first appearance in 1877, illustrated the passage in the old legend of Merlin and Vivien, relating how it came to pass one day that she and Merlin entered a forest, which was called the forest of Broceliande, and found a glorious wood of whitethorn, very high and all in blossom, and seated themselves in the shadow: and Merlin fell asleep, and when she saw that he slept she raised herself softly, and began the spell, exactly according to the teaching of Merlin, drawing the magic circle nine times and uttering the spell nine times. And Merlin looked around him, and it seemed to him as though he were imprisoned in a tower, the highest in the world, and he felt his strength leave him as if the blood were streaming from his veins.
In other pictures he abandons all attempt to introduce ideas, confining himself to the simple grouping of tender girlish figures, by means of which he makes a beautiful composition of the most subtle lines, forms, colours, andgestures. The “Golden Stairs” of 1878 was a picture of this description: a train of girls, beautiful as angels, descended the steps without aim or object, most of them with musical instruments, and all with the same delicate feet and the same robes falling in beautiful folds. In this year he also produced “Venus’ Looking-glass”: a number of nymphs assembled by the side of a clear pool at sunset, in the midst of a sad and solemn landscape, are kneeling by the water’s edge together, reflected in its surface.
Besides these numerous canvases, mention must be made of the decorative works of the master. For the English church in Rome, Burne-Jones has designed decorations in a rich and grave Byzantine style, and in England, where mural decoration has little space accorded to it in churches, there is all the more comprehensive scope for painting upon glass. Until the sixtieschurch windows of this kind were almost exclusively ordered from Germany. The court depôt of glass-painting in Munich provided for the adornment of Glasgow Cathedral from drawings by Schwind, Heinrich Hess, and Schraudolph, and for the windows of St. Paul’s from designs by Schnorr, while Kaulbach was employed for a public building in Edinburgh. In these days Burne-Jones reigns over this whole province. Where the German masters handled glass-painting by modernising it like a Nazarene fresco, Burne-Jones, who has penetrated deeply into the mediæval treatment of form, created a new style in glass-painting, and one exquisitely in keeping with the Neo-Gothic architecture of England. His most important works of this description are probably the glass windows which he designed for St. Martin’s Church and St. Philip’s Church in Birmingham, his native town. These labours of his in the province of Gothic window-painting explain how he came to his style of painting at the easel: he habituated himself to compose his pictures with the architectonical sentiment of a Gothic artist. Forced to satisfy the requisitions of the slender, soaring Gothic style, he came to paint his tall, straight-lined figures, the composition of which is not triangular in the old fashion, but formed in long lines as in vertical church windows.
It is not difficult to find prototypes for every one of these works of his. His sibyls recall Pompeii. His church decoration would never have arisen but for the mosaics of Ravenna. And those angels in golden drapery with grave, hieratical gestures in the pictures of the Trecentisti influenced him in his “Days of Creation.” Other works of his suggest the Etruscan vases or the suavity of Duccio. “Laus Veneris” has the severe classicality of Mantegna saturated with Bellini’s warmth of hue. The “Chant d’Amour,” in its deep splendour of colour, is like an idyll by Giorgione. And often he heaps together costly work in gold and ivory like the Florentine goldsmith painters Pollajuolo and Verrochio. Many of his young girls are of lineal descent from those slender, flexible, feminine saints of Perugino, painted in sweeping lines and planted upon small flat feet. Often, too, when he exaggerates his Gothic principles and gives them eight-and-a-half or nine times the proportion of their heads, they seem, with their lengthy necks and slim hands fit for princesses, like younger sisters of Parmigianino’s lithe-limbed women; while sometimes their movements have a more ample grace, a more majestic nobility, and their lips are moved by the mystical inward smile of Luini, so unfathomably subtle in its silent reserve. But it is Botticelli who is most often brought to mind. Burne-Jones has borrowed from him the fine transparent gauze draperies, clinging to the limbs and betraying clearly the girlish forms in his pictures; the splendid mantles, flowered and adorned with dainty patterns of gold; the taste for Southern vegetation, for flowers and fruits, and artificial bowers of thick palm leaves or delicate boughs of cypress, which he delights in using as a refined and significant embellishment; from Botticelli he has borrowed all the attributes with which he has endowed his angels—rose-garlands and vases, tapers and tall lilies; even his type of womanhood has an outward resemblance to that of the Florentine, with its long, delicate, oval face framed in wavy hair, its dreamy eyes and finely arched brows, its dainty and rather tip-tilted nose, and its ripe, delicately curving mouth slightly opened. Indeed, Burne-Jones’s painting is like one of those gilded flower-tables where plants of all latitudes mingle their tendrils and their foliage, their bells and their clusters, their perfume and their marvellous glory of colour, in a harmony artificially arranged. In its strained archaism his art is an affected, artificial art, and would perish as swiftly as a luxuriant exotic plant, had not this pupil of the Italians been born a thoroughbred Englishman, and this Botticelli risen from the grave become a true Briton on the banks of the Thames.
Burne-Jones stands to Botticelli as Botticelli himself stood to the antique, or as Swinburne to his literary models. As a graceful scholar, Swinburne has reproduced all styles: the language of the Old Testament, the forms of Greek literature, and the naïve lisp of the poets of chivalry. He decorates his verses with all manner of strange metaphors drawn from the literatures of all periods. HisAtalanta in Calydonis, down to the choruses, an imitation of the Sophoclean tragedies. In hisBallad of Lifehe follows the model of the singers who made canzonets, the writers who followed Dante and the earliest lyric poets of Italy. InLaus Venerishe tells the story of Tannhäuser and Dame Venus in the manner of the French romantic poets of the sixteenth century;Saint Dorothyis a faithful echo of Chaucer’s narrative style; and theChristmas Carolis modelled upon the Provençal Ballades. Even the earliest lyrical mysteries are reproduced in some poems so precisely that, so far as form goes, they might be mistaken for originals. But the thought of Swinburne’s verse is what no earlier poet would have ever expressed. It is inconceivable that a Greek chorus would have chanted any song of the weariness of man, and of the gifts of grief and tears brought to him at hiscreation; nor would a Greek have written that Hymn to Aphrodite, the deadly flower born of the foam of blood and the froth of the sea. And inHesperia, where he describes a man who has loved beyond measure and suffered over-much amid the mad pleasures of Rome, and now sets out, pale and exhausted, to sail the golden sea of the West until he reach the “Fortunate Islands” and find peace before his death, the mood does not reflect the thoughts of the old world, but those of the close of the nineteenth century; and so it is, too, in his “Hendecasyllabics,” where he complains in classically chiselled diction of the swift decay of beauty and the hidden ills which of a sudden consume the inward force of life. And Burne-Jones treats old myths with the same freedom and independence. He takes them up and recasts them, discovers modern passions lying in the very heart of them, enriches them with a wealth of delicate shades, borrowed without the smallest ceremony from a new conception of the world and from the life of his own time. The human soul grown old looks back, as it were, upon the path which it has travelled, and sees the spirit of its own ripe age latent in its infancy, recognising that “the child is father of the man.” All the figures in his pictures are surrounded by a dusk which has nothing in common with the broad daylight in which the Renaissance artists placed the antique world. There remains what may be called a residue of modern feeling which has not been assimilated to the old myth, a breath of magic floating round these figures on their career, something mysterious, an elusive air of fable. This, indeed, is the pervasive temperament and sentiment of our own age. It is our own inward spirit that gazes upon us as though from an enchanted mirror with the mien of a phantom.
And just as he remodels the entire spirit of old myths, he converts the figures which he has borrowed into an artistic form of his own, and, without hesitation, subordinates them in type and physical build and bearing to the new part they have to play.
His pictures differ in their whole character from those of the masters of the Quattrocento. In Botticelli, also, the young foliage grows green and flaunts in its exuberant abundance; but in Burne-Jones the vegetation suggests one of those immense forests in Sumatra or Java. All the plants are luxuriant and resplendent in colour, and seem to swoon in their own opulent, plethoric life. Every tree creates an impression of having shot up in swift and wanton growth under a tropical sun. Rank parasitic plants trail from stem to stem, and garlands of climbers grow in a luxuriant tangle round the branches.
And in proportion as the vegetation is luxuriant and sensuous the human figures are wasted and languishing. The severe charm, rigidity, and demureness of the Quattrocento is weakened into lackadaisical melancholy. The dreamy bliss of Botticelli is transposed into sanctified solemnity, delicate fragility, a voluptuous lassitude, a gentle weariness of the world. When he paints ancient sibyls, they are touched at once by the unearthly asceticism of the Middle Ages seeking refuge from the world, and the melancholy, anæmic lassitude of the close of the nineteenth century. If he paints a Venus she does not stand out victorious in her nudity, but wears a heavy brocaded robe, and around her lie the symbols of Christian martyrdom, palms, andperhaps a lyre. It is not the fairness of her body that makes her goddess of love, but only the dim mystery of her radiant eyes. She is not the Olympian who entered into frolicsome adventure with the war-god Mars amid the laughter of the heavenly gods, for in her conventional humiliation she is rather like the beautiful dæmon of the Middle Ages who, upon her journey into exile, passed by the cross where the Son of Man was hanging, and tasted all the bitterness of the years. In their delicate features his Madonnas have a gentle sadness rarely found in the Italian masters. Even the angels, who were roguish and wayward in the Quattrocento, do their spiriting with ceremonious gravity, and a subdued melancholy underlies their devotional reverence. In Botticelli they are fresh, youthful figures, lightly girdled, and with fluttering locks and swelling robes and limber bodies, whether they float around the Madonna in blissful revelry or look up to the Child Christ in their rapt ecstasy. But in Burne-Jones they are devout, sombre, deeply earnest beings, gazing as thoughtfully and dreamily as though they had already known all the affliction of the world. Their limbs seem paralysed, and their gesture weary. It is not possible to look at one of his pictures without being reminded of the Florentines of the fifteenth century, and yet the spectator at once recognises that they are the work of Burne-Jones. He is even opposed to Rossetti, his lord and master, through this element of melancholy: the intoxication of opium is followed by the sober awakening.
Rossetti’s women are dazzling and glorious figures of a modern and deliberately cruel beauty—sisters of Messalina, Phædra, and Faustina. He delineates them as luxuriant beings with supple and splendid bodies, long white necks, and snowily gleaming breasts; with full and fragrant hair, ardent, yearning eyes, and demoniacally passionate lips. Their mother is the Venus Verticordia whom Rossetti so often painted. Cruel in their love as one of the blind forces of nature, they are like that water-sprite with her song and her red coral mouth dragged from the sea in a fishing-net, as an old Frenchfabliautells, and so fair that every man who beheld her was seized by the love of her, but died when he clasped her in his arms. What they love in man is his physical strength, his face and sinews of bronze. Only the strong man who loves them with overpowering madness, like a stormy wind, can bend them to his will. Swinburne has sung of “the lips intertwisted and bitten, where the foam is as blood,” of
“The heavy white limbs and the cruelRed mouth like a venomous flower.”
“The heavy white limbs and the cruel
Red mouth like a venomous flower.”
But the women of Burne-Jones know that this fervour is no longer to be found upon the earth. The blood has been sapped, and the fire burns low, and the glorious, ancient might of love has disappeared. For these women life has lost its sunshine, and love its passion, and the world its hopes. The hue of their cheeks is pallid, their eyes are dim, their bodies sickly and without flesh and blood, and their hips are spare. With pale, quivering lips, and a melancholy smile or a strangely resigned, intensely grieved look flickering at the corners of their mouths, they live consumed by sterile longing, and pine in silent dejection, gazing into vacant space like imprisoned goldfish, or luxuriate in the vague Fata Morgana of an over-delicate, over-refined, and bashfully tremulous eroticism—
“And the chaplets of old are above us,And the oyster-bed teems out of reach;Old poets outsing and outlove us,And Catullus makes mouths at our speech.Who shall kiss in the father’s own city,With such lips as he sang with again?Intercede with us all of thy pity,Our Lady of Pain.”
“And the chaplets of old are above us,
And the oyster-bed teems out of reach;
Old poets outsing and outlove us,
And Catullus makes mouths at our speech.
Who shall kiss in the father’s own city,
With such lips as he sang with again?
Intercede with us all of thy pity,
Our Lady of Pain.”
Swinburne’s first ardent and sensuous volume of lyrics contains a poem,The Garden of Proserpine: it tells how a man weary of all things human and divine, and no longer able to support the intoxicating fragrance of the roses of Aphrodite, draws near with wavering steps to the throne where calm Proserpine sits silent, crowned with cold white flowers. And in the same way Rossetti’s flaming and quivering passion and his volcanic desire end in Burne-Jones with sad resignation.
Whilst Christianity and Hellenism mingle in the figures of Burne-Jones, a division of labour is noticeable amongst the following artists: some addressed themselves exclusively to the treatment of ancient subjects, others to ecclesiastical romantic painting in the style of the Quattrocento, and others again recognised their chief vocation in initiating a reformation in kindred provinces of industrial art.
R. Spencer Stanhope, who was at Oxford, like Burne-Jones, and, indeed, received his first artistic impulses while employed on the elaboration of Rossetti’s mural pictures for the Union, worked even in later days chiefly in the field of decorative painting, and is, with Burne-Jones, the principal designerfor the interior decoration of churches in England. His oil-paintings are few, and in their gracious Quattrocento build they are in outward appearance scarcely different from those of Burne-Jones. In a picture belonging to the Manchester Gallery there is a maiden seated amid a flowery meadow, while a small Cupid with red pinions draws near to her; the landscape has an air of peace and happiness. Another picture—probably inspired by Catullus’Lament for Lesbia’s Sparrow—displays a girl sitting upon an old town wall with a little dead bird. “The Temptation of Eve” is like a brilliantly coloured mediæval miniature, painted with the greatestfinesse. As in the woodcut in the Cologne Bible, Paradise is enclosed with a circular red wall. Eve is like a slim, twisted Gothic statue. Like Burne-Jones, Stanhope is always delicate and poetic, but he is less successful in setting upon old forms of art the stamp of his individuality, and thus giving them new life and a character of their own. In their severe, archæological character his pictures have little beyond the affectation of a style which has been arrived at through imitation.
The third member of this Oxford Circle, the poetWilliam Morris, has exercised great influence over English taste by the institution of an industrial establishment for embroidery, painting upon glass, and household decoration. Keeping in mind that close union which existed in the fifteenth century between art and the manual crafts, he and certain of his disciples did not hesitate to provide designs for decorative stuffs, wall-papers, furniture, and household embellishments of every description. They were largely indebted to the Japanese, to say nothing of the old Italians, though they succeeded in creating a thoroughly modern and independent style, in spite of all they borrowed. The whole range of industrial art in England received a new lease of life, and householddecoration became blither and more cheerful in its appearance. Only light, delicate, and finely graduated colours were allowed to predominate, and they were combined with slender, graceful, and vivacious form. The heavy panelling which was popular in the sixties gave way to bright papers ornamented with flowers; narrow panes made way for large plate-glass windows with light curtains, in which long-stemmed flowers were entwined in the pattern. Slim pillars supported cabinets painted in exquisite hues or gleaming with lacquer-work and enamel. Seats were ornamented with soft cushions shining in all the delicate splendour of Indian silks. And the pre-Raphaelite style of ornamentation was even extended to the embellishment of books, so that England created the modern book, at a time when other nations adhered altogether to the imitation of old models.
In his early yearsArthur Hughesattracted much attention by an Ophelia, a delicate, thoroughly English figure of soft pre-Raphaelite grace; but in later years he rarely got beyond sentimental Renaissance maidens suggestive of Julius Wolff, and humorous work in the style ofgenre.
J. N. Strudwick, who worked first under Spencer Stanhope and then under Burne-Jones, was more consistent in his fidelity to the pre-Raphaelite principles. His pictures have the same delicate, enervated mysticism, and the same thoughtful, dreamy poetry, as those of his elders in the school. By preference he paints slender, pensive girlish figures, with the sentiment of Burne-Jones, taking his motive from some passage in a poet. In a picture called “Elaine” the heroine is mournfully seated in a lofty room of a mediæval palace. Another of his works reveals three girls occupied with music. Or a knight strewn with roses lies asleep in a maiden’s lap. Or again, there is St. Cecilia standing with her Seraphina before a Roman building. Strudwick does not possessthe spontaneity of his master. The childlike, angular effect at which he aims often seems slightly weak and mawkish; and occasionally his painting is somewhat diffident, especially when he paints in the architectural detail and rich artistic accessories, and stipples with a very fine brush. But his works are so exquisite and delicate, so precious and æsthetic, that they must be reckoned amongst the most characteristic performances of the New pre-Raphaelitism. One of his larger compositions he has named “Bygone Days.” There is a man musing over the memories of his life, as he sits upon a white marble throne in front of a long white marble wall, amid an evening landscape. He stretches out his arms after the vanished years of his youth, the years when love smiled upon him; but Time, a winged figure like Orcagna’sMorte, divides him from the goddess of love, swinging his scythe with a threatening gesture. “The Past,” a slender matron in a black robe, covers her face lamenting. In Strudwick’s most celebrated picture, “The Ramparts of God’s House,” there is a man standing at the threshold of heaven, naked as a Greek athlete. His earthly fetters lie shattered at his feet. Angels receive him, marvellously spiritual beings filled with a lovely simplicity and revealing ineffable profundity of soul, beings who partake of Fra Angelico almost as much as of Ellen Terry. Their expression is quiet and peaceful. Instead of marvelling at the new-comer, they gaze with their eyes green as a water-sprite’s meditatively into illimitable space. The architecture in the background is entirely symbolical, as in the pictures of Giotto. A little house with a golden roof and gilded mediæval reliefs is inhabited by a dense throng of little angels, as if it were a Noah’s-ark. The colour is rich and sonorous, as in the youthful works of Carlo Crivelli.