The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1882-05-26
vernon Lee, in the British quarterly Review.

Vernon Lee, in the British Quarterly Review.
The Portraits of the Renaissance.
These men and women of the Italian Renals-
sance have, in their portraits, very pleasing
nobility of aspect; serene, thoughtful, neaitny'
benign. Titian's courtesans are our arche-
types of dignified womanhood; we might IAN
cy Portia or Isabella with such calm, horid
beauty, SO wholly unmeretricious and uncank-
cred. The humanists and priests who lie OUT
stretched on the acanthus-leaved and flower
garlanded sarcophagi by Desiderio and Rossei-
limo are the very ideals of refined and gentle
men of study; the youths in Botticellis "Ado-
ration of the Magi," for instance, are the ideal
of Boiards's chivalry, Rinaldos and Orlandos
every one; the corseleted Generals of the Re-
naissance, SO calm and stern and frank, the
Bartoomeo Colleoni of Verrocchio, the Gatta-
melata by Giorgione Tor Giorgione's pupil) look
fit to take up the banner of the crusade; that
Gattamelata in the Ufizi Gallery especially
looks like sort of military Milton; give him
pair of wings and he becomes at once Slgno-
rellis archangel, clothed in heavenly steel and
unsheathing the flaming sword OF God. Com
pare with these types Holbein's eourtiers OF
Henry VIII; what scrofulous hogsl Compare
Sanchez Coello's Philip III. and Don Carlos;
what monomaniacsi Compare even Durer's
magnificent head of Willibald Pirkheimer;
how the swine nature is blended with the
thinker. And the swine will be subdued, the
thinker will triumph. Why? just because
there is contest-because the thinker wi ILL
bald is conscious of the Willibald. In
this coarse, brutal, deeply stained German OF
| the time of Luther, affording Diirer and Hol-
| bein, alasi how many besotten and bestlal
types, there will arise great conflict; the OBJ
scene leering death-death-ln-life as he really
| is-will skulk everywhere, even as in the
prints of the day, hideous and powerful, trying,
| with hogs snout, to drive Christ himself out OF
| limbo; but he is known, seen, dreaded. Inc
| armed knight of Durer turns away from his
| grimacings, and urges on his steel-covered
| horse He visits even the best, even Luther
| in the Wartburg; but the good men open their
| Bibles, cry " Vdde retroi" and throw their ink
stands at him, showing themselves terrified
| and ruffied after the combat. And these Ger
mans CT Luther's are disgustingly fond OF blood
| and horrors; they like to see the blood squirt
| from the decapitated trunk, to watch its last
| contortions; they hammer with will lin Du-
| rer's "Passion') the nails of the cross, they
| peel off strips of skin in the hagellation. But
| then they can master all that; they can be
| pure, charitable; they have gentleness for the
| hare and the rabbit, like Luther; they kneel
piously before the cross bearing stag, like st.
| Hubert. Not so the Italians. They rarely or
never paint horrors, or death, or denominations.
| Their fsgellated Christ, their arrow-riddled
| Sebastian, never writhe or howl with pain
| indeed, they suffer none. Judith, in Manteg-
| mas print, puts the head of Holophernes into
| her bag with the serenity of muse, and the
| head is quite clean, without loathsome drip
| pings or torn depending strings of muscle.