It is the method of Nature to produce the extraordinary by isolation
and the exclusion of opposed qualities. Thus, it was necessary that,
in Michelangelo, earnestness and the deep significant energy of Nature
should prevail, rather than a sense of the grace and sensibility that
belong to the Soul, in order to display the extreme of pure plastic
force in the painting of modern times.
After the earlier violence and the vehement impulse of birth is
assuaged, the spirit of Nature is transfigured into Soul, and Grace is
born. This point Art reached, after Leonardo da Vinci, in Correggio,
in whose works the sensuous Soul is the active principle of Beauty.
* * * * *
As the modern fable of Psyche closes the circle of the old mythology;
so Painting, by giving a preponderance to the Soul, attained a new,
though not a higher step of Art.
This Guido Reni strove after, and became the proper painter of the
Soul. Such seems to us to be the necessary interpretation of his whole
endeavor, often uncertain, and, in many of his works, losing itself in
the vague.
This is shown, as, perhaps, in few of his other pictures, in the
masterpiece that is offered to the admiration of all in the great
collection of our king.
In the figure of the heavenward-ascending Virgin, all harshness and
sternness are effaced, even to the last trace; and, indeed, does not
Painting itself seem in it to soar upward, transfigured on its own
pinions, as the liberated Psyche delivered from the severity of Form?
Here nothing outward remains, with separate natural force; everything
expresses receptivity and still endurance, even the perishable flesh,
the character of which the Italian language designates by the term
_morbidezza_, altogether unlike that with which Raphael invests the
descending Queen of Heaven, as she appears to the adoring pope and a
saint.
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