File:Italian backgrounds (1907) (14781118651).jpg

Identifier: italianbackgroun00wharrich (find matches)
Title: Italian backgrounds
Year: 1907 (1900s)
Authors: Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937
Subjects: Art -- Italy Italy -- Description and travel
Publisher: New York : Charles Scrinber's Sons
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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y of Milan—as though endeavouring in ad-vance to placate the traveller for its not looking likeFlorence or Siena! Of late, indeed, a new school of writers, amongwhom Mr. J. W. Anderson, and the German authors,Messrs. Ebe and Gurlitt, deserve the first mention,have broken through this conspiracy of silence, andcalled attention to the intrinsically Italian art of thepost-Renaissance period; the period which, from Mi-chael Angelo to Juvara, has been marked in sculp-ture and architecture (though more rarely in paint-ing) by a series of memorable names. SignorFranchettis admirable monograph on Bernini, andthe recent volume on Tiepolo in the Knackfuss seriesof Kiinstler-Monographien have done their part inthis redistribution of values; and it is now possiblefor the traveller to survey the course of Italian artwith the impartiality needful for its due enjoyment,and to admire, for instance, the tower of the Mangiawithout scorning the palace of the Consulta. (156) . > ,.. ■!.>V-.V .^
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PICTURESQUE MILAN II But, it may be asked, though Milan will seem moreinteresting to the emancipated judgment, will it ap-pear more picturesque? Picturesqueness is, afterall, what the Italian pilgrim chiefly seeks; and thecurrent notion of the picturesque is a purely Ger-manic one, connoting Gothic steeples, pepper-potturrets, and the huddled steepness of the northernburgh. Italy offers little, and Milan least of all, to satisfythese requirements. The Latin ideal demandedspace, order, and nobility of composition. But doesit follow that picturesqueness is incompatible withthese? Take up one of Piranesis etchings—thosestrange compositions in which he sought to seize thespirit of a city or a quarter by a mingling of its mostcharacteristic features. Even the northern concep-tion of the picturesque must be satisfied by the som-bre wildness of these studies—here a ruined aqueduct,casting its shade across a lonely stretch of groundtufted ^vith acanthus, there a palace colonnadethrough wh

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