We Had To Leave Her When We Left
The Museum In The Charge Of Two Custodians Who Led Her, Involuntary But
Unresisting, To An Upper Chamber Where There Were Some Pictures Which
She Could Care No More For Than For The Wood Carvings Below.
We
ourselves cared so little for those pictures that we would not go to see
them.
Pictures you can see anywhere, but not statuary of such singular
interest, such transcendant powerfulness as those carvings of Berruguete
and other masters less known, which held us fascinated in the lower
rooms of the museum. They are the spoil of convents in the region about,
suppressed by the government at different times, and collected here with
little relevancy to their original appeal. Some are Scriptural subjects
and some are figures of the dancers who take part in certain ceremonials
of the Spanish churches (notably the cathedral at Seville), which have a
quaint reality, an intense personal character. They are of a fascination
which I can hope to convey by no phrase of mine; but far beyond this is
the motionless force, the tremendous repose of the figures of the Roman
soldiers taken in the part of sleeping at the Tomb. These sculptures are
in wood, life-size, and painted in the colors of flesh and costume, with
every detail and of a strong mass in which the detail is lost and must
be found again by the wondering eye. Beyond all other Spanish sculptures
they seemed to me expressive of the national temperament; I thought no
other race could have produced them, and that in their return to the
Greek ideal of color in statuary they were ingenuously frank and
unsurpassably bold.
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