Identifier: greatpicturesassx00sing (find matches)
Title: Great pictures, as seen and described by famous writers
Year: 1899 (1890s)
Authors: Singleton, Esther, d. 1930, ed. and tr
Subjects: Painting
Publisher: New York : Dodd, Mead and Company
Contributing Library: Boston Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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name ofthe goldsmith who first taught him art. Only two thingshappened to him, two things which he shared with otherartists — he was invited to Rome to paint in the SistineChapel, and he fell in later life under the influence ofSavonarola, passing apparently almost out of mens sightin a sort of religious melancholy which lasted till his deathin 1515, according to the received date. Vasari says thathe plunged into the study of Dante, and even wrote acomment on the Divine Comedy. But it seems strangethat he should have lived on inactive so long; and onealmost wishes that some document might come to lightwhich, fixing the date of his death earlier, might relieveone, in thinking of him, of his dejected old age. He is before all things a poetical painter, blending thecharm of story and sentiment, the medium of the art ofpoetry, with the charm of line and colour, the medium ofabstract painting. So he becomes the illustrator of Dante.In a few rare examples of the edition of 1481, the blank
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THE BIRTH OF VENUS 7 spaces left at the beginning of every canto for the handof the illuminator have been filled as far as the nineteenthcanto of the Inferno^ with impressions of engraved plates,seemingly by way of experiment, for in the copy in theBodleian Library, one of the three impressions it containshas been printed upside down and much awry in the midstof the luxurious printed page. Giotto, and the followersof Giotto, with their almost childish religious aim, had notlearned to put that weight of meaning into outward things,light, colour, every-day gesture, which the poetry of theDivine Comedy involves, and before the Fifteenth CenturyDante could hardly have found an illustrator. Botticellisillustrations are crowded with incident, blending with anaive carelessness of pictorial propriety three phases of thesame scene into one plate. The grotesques, so often astumbling-block to painters who forget that the words ofa poet, which only feebly present an image to the mind,must be lowe

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