As Regards Painting, The Last Rays Of The Sunset Of Genuine Art Are
To Be Found In The Votive Pictures At Locarno Or Oropa, And In Many
A Wayside Chapel.
In these, religious art still lingers as a
living language, however rudely spoken.
In these alone is the
story told, not as in the Latin and Greek verses of the scholar,
who thinks he has succeeded best when he has most concealed his
natural manner of expressing himself, but by one who knows what he
wants to say, and says it in his mother-tongue, shortly, and
without caring whether or not his words are in accordance with
academic rules. I regret to see photography being introduced for
votive purposes, and also to detect in some places a disposition on
the part of the authorities to be a little ashamed of these
pictures and to place them rather out of sight.
Sometimes in a little country village, as at Doera near Mesocco,
there is a modern fresco on a chapel in which the old spirit
appears, with its absolute indifference as to whether it was
ridiculous or no, but such examples are rare.
Sometimes, again, I have even thought I have detected a ray of
sunset upon a milkman's window-blind in London, and once upon an
undertaker's, but it was too faint a ray to read by. The best
thing of the kind that I have seen in London is the picture of the
lady who is cleaning knives with Mr. Spong's patent knife-cleaner,
in his shop window nearly opposite Day & Martin's in Holborn.
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