File:Italian cities (1903) (14773484911).jpg

Identifier: italiancities01blas (find matches)
Title: Italian cities
Year: 1903 (1900s)
Authors: Blashfield, Edwin Howland, 1848-1936 Blashfield, Evangeline Wilbour, d. 1918
Subjects: Art -- Italy Cities and towns -- Italy Italy -- Description and travel
Publisher: New York : Scribner's
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
gold and ultra-marine, the fiat landscape, the ill-drawn but richlycostumed figures, and the fioriated borders of oneof the great choir-books which line the room, had,in some mysterious way, been transferred to itswalls. It is incredible that these frescoes are four hundredyears old. Surely Pinturicchio came down fromhis scaffoldings but yesterday. This is how thehardly dried plaster must have looked to pope andcardinals and princes when the boards were re-moved, and when the very figures on these walls— smart youths in tights and slashes, bright-robedscholars, ecclesiastics caped in ermine, ladies withlong braids bound in nets of silk, crowded to seethemselves embalmed in tempera for curious after-centuries to gaze upon. The first four panels are the most charming; theyare a little hard, a little spotty, a little vulgarizedby the applied ornaments of gilded plaster in highrelief, and yet what charm there is in the pensive, 134 SIENA DUOMOPIETRO DEL MINELLATHE DEATH OF ABSALOM »«
Text Appearing After Image:
SIENA young faces, in the strange piled-up backgrounds,and what variety and elegance in the costumes. The subject is a moral tale of the Renaissance:how a good little boy, by minding his book andobeying his pastors and masters, became a greatscholar, a cardinal, and finally a pope. And to thosewho know the life of this saintly humanist, who wasalso a passionate lover of beauty and the literaryforerunner of Th^ophile Gautier and Taine, it ispleasant to find this idyllic memorial of him in hisnative town. The whole Library, too, is interestingas an example of homogeneous decoration; thewainscoting is enriched with the antiphonals, thevaultings shine with the grotesques of John ofUdine; at one end of the room are the Piccolominishields all a-row under the red hats, while just abovethe doorway Querela has placed his muscular, nudeAdam and Eve, whom the angel is very properlyejecting from the presence of all these finely dressedfolk, and whom we find again on Fonte Gaia, wherethey are more

Note About Images