File:Italian cities (1903) (14796501363).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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eretical books. By anunconscious irony it is placed directly opposite thebenignant image of the Good Shepherd ; and the twoconflicting aspects of Christianity — its bitter intol-erance and its loving charity — confront each otherin this narrow space. Tlie sun of Greek art wassetting, but it still shone upon Eavenna. Themosaicist of San Apollinare saw about him in thestreets the stiff-robed Byzantines ; but he had seen,too, the pagan temples with their friezes and tympanaand their figures clad in simple sweeping draperies,so that his long procession of virgins and martyrsmoved in measured harmonies like the epheboi andcanephorge of the Parthenon. The grand white-robed angels, the brown-locked, beardless Christ ofthe apse, were calm and stately ; line and mass werestill noble; beauty had passed away, but antiquedignity had survived the sack of Kome, and in afallen Greece the memory of the Zeus at Olympiahad not yet quite faded. 22 RAVENNA END OF A SARCOPHAGUSDANIEL liN THE LIONS DEN
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RAVENNA But it was only a tradition, not a living reality.Tradition taught the artist a certain grandeur ofcomposition, a conventional position of head andhands, a good treatment of the general lines of thedrapery, but it could do no more for him. Therewas no body under the drapery, no muscles to movethe head or raise the hands. The face was a weak-ened copy of the antique type, the cranium shrunkenand elongated; the great hollow eyes and pinchedlips had no life in them; they could not move.What Medusa of decadence had stricken these peo-ple to stone ? What had so changed the type, soutterly transformed the ideal of the artist ? Wherewere the athletes, the gods, the goddesses he lovedso well, and how came these hollow-eyed wraiths intheir place? Was it incapacity of the artist ordegeneracy of the models? It was both, as thehistory and conditions of Byzantium show us. The Greek of Pericless day, when he carved agod or an athlete, went to the gymnasium or palaestraand found his model initaliancities01blas

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