Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1891 edition. Excerpt: ...Baptist, the Apostles, Evangelists and Martyrs in the clouds, with God the Father sending down His Holy Spirit upon all, and with an endless number of the Saints." The painter's meaning is also helped out by the subsidiary paintings in the series to which it belongs. In the accessory to the scene on the mountain sacred to the Muses symbolising Poetry, the figures of the poeis are conti asted with that of Marsyas punished. In the picture which accompanies that of which we treat, redeemed humanity is contrasted with the fallen Adam. The Fathers Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, and Gregory, with St. Dominic, Francis, and Nicholas, Dante, Savonarola, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, Duns Scotus, and others having entered into the courts of the heavenly city, contemplate the Mystery of the Eucharist, before which they have bowed, and by which they have lived. We are keenly aware of the fact that in this chapter on the Iconogi aphical schemes of the Middle Ages, and in these bald classifications we have been obliged to resort to, we lay ourselves open to the charge of attempting to reduce Art and Poetry to a bare skeleton where all is mapped out with scientific precision; but Art in its wider sense can bear the test of analysis as surely as any great epic such as those of Milton or Dante. Now that we have attempted to reveal the framework of the Christian Epos in the Middle Ages, we hope to add in our following chapters some remarks on the vivifying influence of the Drama, and of Poeti y in the opening life of Keligious Art. The result of these Mirrors and Bibles of the Poor was to offer the painter in a certain sequence a vast gallery of symbols associated with the primitive emotions of humanity, while the actor, using the same texts, makes these...