tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22560219.post1266332539561174350..comments2023-12-07T20:31:28.197-05:00Comments on Islands of Joy: NYC report part 2Sørina Higginshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10907200327850346539noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22560219.post-51208351902942008322010-11-20T20:14:29.537-05:002010-11-20T20:14:29.537-05:00"1st. Receive the witness of Painting.
"..."1st. Receive the witness of Painting.<br /><br />"It will be remembered that I put the commencement of the Fall of Venice as far back as 1418.<br /><br />Now, John Bellini was born in 1423, and Titian in 1480. John Bellini, and his brother Gentile, two years older than he, close the line of the sacred painters of Venice. But the most solemn spirit of religious faith animates their works to the last. There is no religion in any work of Titian's: there is not even the smallest evidence of religious temper or sympathies either in himself, or in those for whom he painted. His larger sacred subjects are merely themes for the exhibition of pictorial rhetoric,- composition and color. His minor works are generally made subordinate to purposes of portraiture. The Madonna in the church of the Frari is a mere lay figure, introduced to form a link of connection between the portraits of various members of the Pesaro family who surround her.<br /><br />Now this is not merely because John Bellini was a religious man and Titian was not. Titian and Bellini are each true representatives of the school of painters contemporary with them; and the difference in their artistic feeling is a consequence not so much of difference in their own natural characters as in their early education: Bellini was brought up in faith; Titian in formalism. Between the years of their births the vital religion of Venice had expired.<br /><br />SECTION XIV. The <i>vital</i> religion, observe, not the formal. Outward observance was as strict as ever; and doge and senator still were painted, in almost every important instance, kneeling before the Madonna or St. Mark; a confession of faith made universal by the pure gold of the Venetian sequin. But observe the great picture of Titian's in the ducal palace, of the Doge Antonio Grimani kneeling before Faith: there is a curious lesson in it. The figure of Faith is a coarse portrait of one of Titian's least graceful female models: Faith had become carnal. The eye is first caught by the flash of the Doge's armor. The heart of Venice was in her wars, not in her worship.<br /><br />The mind of Tintoret, incomparably more deep and serious than that of Titian, casts the solemnity of its own tone over the sacred subjects which it approaches, and sometimes forgets itself into devotion; but the principle of treatment is altogether the same as Titian's: absolute subordination of the religious subject to purposes of decoration or portraiture.<br /><br />"The evidence might be accumulated a thousandfold from the works of Veronese, and of every succeeding painter,- that the fifteenth century had taken away the religious heart of Venice."<br />etc.A.https://www.blogger.com/profile/02076078818767809436noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22560219.post-71468387953156738102010-11-20T20:14:04.380-05:002010-11-20T20:14:04.380-05:00Ah, how good! I want to explore what it is to live...Ah, how good! I want to explore what it is to live as generously as Jesus did, from the riches of His infinite and very close love. There are so many people who do this well, and it's one of the most beautiful things. If our art can contain this, it's so good.<br /><br />I read just the first few pages of a fascinating book while I was away: <i>The Stones of Venice</i> by John Ruskin, written in the nineteenth century. Even what I've read I need to look at much more deeply. There is a point that (as I interpret its beginning, at least) speaks well to what you've been saying about using 'Christian' as an adjective for the content or style of art when we should really be 'Christians who make art'.<br /><br />Ruskin's notion of the Renaissance as the period when the "domestic and individual religion" declined in Venice, causing the decay of the entire civilisation in its art and its politics, seems both to illustrate and to qualify your notion. Our faith in a secular society is quite different to that within the state of Christendom or through the a poetry of folk religion- which once were, though flawed, genuine instruments of the knowledge of God. The conversation regarding 'Christian art' may be different in other cultural light, and even in the heritage of our own formative art and literature. I don't yet know enough to write more, but here are some lines from the book...<br />[See next comment. Seems there are too many words!]A.https://www.blogger.com/profile/02076078818767809436noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22560219.post-50091627889267935592010-10-29T21:05:56.712-05:002010-10-29T21:05:56.712-05:00Wonderful! wonderful! The current New Age movement...Wonderful! wonderful! The current New Age movement likes to talk about the excess in nature and our loss by living like there is no excess; but how much more free, how much more delightful, to know that there is more than enough & live to share that with those who do not yet experience it! Great conversationAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22560219.post-38497989553231354102010-10-29T21:05:37.877-05:002010-10-29T21:05:37.877-05:00Wonderful! wonderful! The current New Age movement...Wonderful! wonderful! The current New Age movement likes to talk about the excess in nature and our loss by living like there is no excess; but how much more free, how much more delightful, to know that there is more than enough & live to share that with those who do not yet experience it! Great conversationAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com