Some Of Us Are Even Mute In The Presence Of The School Of
Athens, Whatever Reserves We May Utter Concerning
The Transfiguration.
If we are honest, we more or less own what our impressions really are
from those other famous
Works, concerning which our impressions are
otherwise altogether and inexpressibly unimportant; it is a question of
ethics and not aesthetics, as most of our simple-hearted company suppose
it to be; and, if we are dishonest, we pretend to have felt and thought
things at first-hand from them which we have learned at second-hand from
our reading. I will confess, for my small part, that I had more pleasure
in the coloring and feeling of some of the older canvases and in here
and there a Titian than in all the Raphaels in the Stanze of his name.
I was not knowing his works for the first time; no one perhaps does
that, such is the multiplicity of the copies of them; and I vividly
remembered them from my acquaintance with the originals four decades
before, as I had remembered the Michelangelos; but in their presence and
in the presence of so many other masterpieces in the different rooms,
with their horrible miracles and atrocious martyrdoms, I realized as for
the first time what a bloody religion ours was. It was such relief, such
rest, to go from those broilings and beheadings and crucifixions and
Sayings and stabbings into the long, tranquil aisles of the museum where
the marble men and women, created for earthly immortality by Greek art,
welcomed me to their serenity and sanity.
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