He is a magnificent
master of ceremonies, and ought to have been kept by some king
desirous of going down to posterity, to celebrate his royal praise and
glory.
Another room is devoted to the works of Guido. One or two of the Ecce
Homo are much admired. To me they are, as compared with my conceptions
of Jesus, more than inadequate. It seems to me that, if Jesus Christ
should come again on earth, and walk through a gallery of paintings,
and see the representations of sacred subjects, he would say again, as
he did of old in the temple, "Take these things hence!"
How could men who bowed down before art as an idol, and worshipped it
as an ultimate end, and thus sensualized it, represent these holy
mysteries, into which angels desired to look?
There are many representations of Christ here, set forth in the guide
book as full of grace and majesty, which, any soul who has ever felt
his infinite beauty would reject as a libel. And as to the Virgin
Mother, one's eye becomes wearied in following the countless catalogue
of the effeminate inane representations.
There is more pathos and beauty in those few words of the Scripture,
"Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother," than in all these
galleries put together. The soul that has learned to know her from the
Bible, loving without idolizing, hoping for blest communion with her
beyond the veil, seeking to imitate only the devotion which stood by
the cross in the deepest hour of desertion, cannot be satisfied with
these insipidities.
Only once or twice have I seen any thing like an approach towards the
representations of the _scriptural_ idea. One is this painting by
Raphael. Another is by him, and is called Madonna Maison d'Alba: of
this I have seen only a copy; it might have been painted on the words,
"Now Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart." The
figure is that of a young Jewess, between girl and womanhood, in whose
air and eye are expressed at once the princess of the house of David,
the poetess, and the thoughtful sequestered maiden. She is sitting on
the ground, the book of the prophets in one hand, lying listless at
her side; the other hand is placed beneath the chin of her infant son,
who looks inquiringly into her face. She does not see him - her eye has
a sorrowful, far-darting look, as if beyond this flowery childhood she
saw the dim image of a cross and a sepulchre. This was Mary, I have
often thought that, in the reaction from the idolatry of Romanism, we
Protestants were in danger of forgetting the treasures of religious
sweetness, which the Bible has given us in her brief history.
