File:Italian hours (1909) (14756423866).jpg

Identifier: cu31924028396004 (find matches)
Title: Italian hours
Year: 1909 (1900s)
Authors: James, Henry, 1843-1916 Pennell, Joseph, 1857-1926, illus
Subjects:
Publisher: Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin company
Contributing Library: Cornell University Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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Text Appearing Before Image:
lpits, covered with carven hierogylphics of an almostEgyptian abstruseness — lambs and stags and fishes and beastsof theological affinities even less apparent. Upon all these strangethings the strange figures in the great mosaic panorama lookdown, with coloured cheeks and staring eyes, lifelike enough tospeak to you and answer your wonderment and tell you in badLatin of the decadence that it was in such and such a fashionthey believed and worshipped. First, on each side, near the door,are houses and ships and various old landmarks of Ravenna;then begins a long procession, on one side, of twenty-two white-robed virgins and three obsequious magi, terminating in a thronebearing the Madonna and Child, surrounded by four angels; onthe other side, of an equal number of male saints (twenty-five,that is) holding crowns in their hands and leading to a Saviourenthroned between angels of singular expressiveness. What it isthese long slim seraphs express I cannot quite say, but they have (472 )
Text Appearing After Image:
SANT APOLLINARE NUOVO, RAVENNA. RAVENNAan odd, knowing, sidelong look out of the narrow ovals of theireyes which, though not without sweetness, would certainly makeme murmur a defensive prayer or so were I to find myself alonein the church towards dusk. All this work is of the latter partof the sixth century and brilliantly preserved. The gold back-grounds twinkle as if they had been inserted yesterday, and hereand there a figure is executed almost too much in the modernmanner to be interesting; for the charm of mosaic work is, tomy sense, confined altogether to the infancy of the art. The greatChrist, in the series of which I speak, is quite an elaborate pic-ture, and yet he retains enough of the orthodox stiffness to makehim impressive in the simpler, elder sense. He is clad in a purplerobe, even as an emperor, his hair and beard are artfully curled,his eyebrows arched, his complexion brilliant, his whole aspectsuch a one as the popular mind may have attributed to Honoriusor Valenti

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