File:Italian cities (1903) (14774296114).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

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d of hisnarrative in a labyrinth of episodes. But as the eyewanders with a certain pleased curiosity from a jew-elled caparison to a quaintly slashed jerkin ; froma youthful, wistful face to a white castellated townhalf hidden in sombre verdure, we pardon this wealthof detail. The lovely adolescents, with their vaguewide-eyed glance and their dreamy, distant smile ;the sumptuous yet exquisite costumes; above all,the sense of inexhaustible, facile invention, blindus at first to the defects in the drawing, and to theisolation of the painted personages who, each oneof them, seems to be leading a separate existenceof his own, and has little or no relation to the otherfigures in the same composition. And not only the figures, but the groups also, areisolated from each other, making a sort of open-work pattern agreeable in general lines, neverthelesstoo thin and lace-like to adequately represent suchdignified and balanced arrangement as the subjects 138 SIENA INTERIOR OF PICCOLOMINI LIBRARY
Text Appearing After Image:
SIENA required: stately subjects, — royal marriages, pro-cessions, councils. Many masters of the fifteenthcentury cannot avoid confusion in their large com-positions, but their masses, if awkwardly composed,usually continue to be masses. Pinturicchios groupsbreak up into little knots of people who stand insomewhat papery silhouette against the background,and in artists phrase, his composition is often full ofholes. As for his draughtsmanship, he could draw onoccasion excellently, —witness the faces in his frescoof the Sistine Chapel; but he did not often rise to suchoccasion ; perhaps because he was too hurried, or per-haps because he did not care. At all events, whetherhumed or indifferent, he was exceptionally canny inhis relations with his patrons. He knew the influ-ence of bright gold upon both the clerical and thelaic imagination, the effect of the glitter of a gildedsurface in relief. Ghirlandajo, says Vasari, didaway in a great measure with those flourishes andscrolls forme

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