Ravenna. Siena. The Florentine artist. In Florence with Romola. ParmaC. Scribner's Sons, 1900 - Art |
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admiration altar-pieces angels antique arches artist Baptistery Bardi Bargello Bazzi beauty Botticelli Bratti Brunelleschi Byzantine carving Castello cathedral chapel character charm church civic color Correggio Cosimo costumes cupola Dante decoration dome Donatello draperies Duccio Duomo eyes façade face famous Farnese fifteenth century figures filled Florence Florentine Fra Bartolommeo frescoes George Eliot gilded Giotto gold Gothic grace Greek head huge Italian Italy jewelled later lived loggia looked Lorenzo Madonna marble master mediæval Medici medieval memories ment Michelangelo modern monks mosaic noble Pagan painted painters palace palæstra Palazzo Palazzo Vecchio Parma passed patron Petrarch Piazza Piero Pinturicchio Pope portrait Raphael Ravenna Renaissance republic rich Roman Rome Romola Saint San Giovanni San Marco Santa Croce Santa Maria Novella Savonarola sculpture seen shrine Siena Sienese stone stood story strange streets Strozzi Tessa Tito to-day tower town Vasari Vecchio walls whole young youth
Popular passages
Page 96 - In a word, the Holy Family became the Human Family. The Florentine treatment of secondary figures, the introduction of portraits, of domestic animals, man's humbler brothers in the Presepio, the landscape backgrounds with their flower-enamelled meadows and winding streams, were almost as distasteful to the Sienese devotee as was the vulgarization of the Madonna. There was no feeling for out-door Nature in the gilded altar-piece ; there a Midas touch had turned the flowers to goldsmiths' work, and...
Page 129 - ... undoubtedly suggestive, with its white marble ornaments upon a pink marble ground, of a huge, sugared cake. It is impossible to look at this restored whiteness with the sun upon it; the dazzled eyes close involuntarily and one sees in retrospect the great, gray church front at Rheims, or the solemn facade of Notre Dame de Paris.
Page 205 - PIECE stand guard over the town like the stone saints at the doorway of a church : the Cathedral, a huge Christopher, lifting the cross upon the greatest of all domes ; the fair Campanile, like a Gabriel of the Annunciation, wearing the lily of Florence, and calling "Ave Maria" from its peal of bells; and the Palazzo Vecchio, the Michael of the city, bearing the shields of the republic, summoning the townsmen to arms, and giving voice to the will of the people. Then, too, there are San Giovanni,...
Page 8 - Emperor was grand inquisitor in matters of faith, the Empress not inactive ; and more than once, to quote the words of Cyril, " the holy Virgin of the court of heaven found an advocate in the holy Virgin of the court of Constantinople." The citizen who had left far behind him the days of the palaestra and the academy, now decked in curiously embroidered garments and loaded with jewels, passed his time in the circus, an eager partisan of the greens or blues ; tarred on his favorite bishop in the hotter...
Page 188 - Leave me to work and do thou provide, for now that I have begun to get into the spirit and comprehend the method of this art, I grudge that they do not commission me to paint the whole circuit of all the walls of Florence with stories...
Page 147 - ... no proof that she ever left him. It is highly probable that, after all, Giorgio's injustice to Bazzi came primarily from an inability to understand him. The whimsical, roguish Lombard, with a little of the charlatan and much of the boy in his character, was incomprehensible to the earnest, studious, laborious Florentine, and Bazzi's love of frolic and his light-hearted willingness to appear worse than he was, gave Vasari sufficient cause to distrust and despise him. The most charitable and not...
Page 236 - Caparra. On the left a dark, bald man, in a plain russet suit, suggests Baldassarre, and one shrewd face, with a humorous twinkle in the keen eyes, must be Nello's ; while near by is another actor in our drama — young Lorenzo Tornabuoni, then in the Medicean bank. For the peasants and some of the older folk, pretty Tessa, meek, deaf Monna Lisa, bargaining Bratti, and silly Brigida, we must go to Fra Filippo Lippi, who was not afraid to paint very commonplace sinners as saints, little rustics as...
Page 2 - ... hundred years ago, when Italy flamed behind the horsemen of Alaric, the Emperor Honorius fled to the strongest city in the land, Ravenna, and with his corrupt and motley court went one noble fugitive, the genius of the Arts, who illustrates for all time the name of her asylum. In those days Ravenna was still a port ; but the sea, which made her greatness, has by receding destroyed her political importance, thus leaving her to hold the more surely, in her slow decay, the buildings of a time which...
Page 49 - Tuscan painters were eagerly studying nature and antiquity, they were reproducing the old, bedizened, Byzantine Madonnas. When every Italian architect elsewhere was designing cupolas and colonnades, Siena's builders still clung to the Gothic ; Orvieto sent to them for master-workmen for the cathedral until 1450, and Gian Galeazzo Sforza summoned Francesco di Giorgio to compete for the facade of the great church of Milan as late as 1490. Finally, when all Italy was permeated with the new spirit and...
Page 239 - ... whose descent upon Tessa, and temporary conversion of Monna Brigida, brighten the hitter part of the story. But tragedy soon meets us again in the Bargello. Nowhere in Florence is the contrast between the past and the present more marked than in the Bargello, that older brother of the Palazzo Vecchio ; once a place of punishment and torture, the head-quarters of the podestd, or military governor of the city. Grim memories cling about its massive walls — it has stood sieges, held patriots and...