This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1840 edition. Excerpt: ... however, will always offer a remarkable specimen of the highly drastic quality of the artist's imagination. One of the least satisfactory productions is a sketch, Christ enthroned on a rainbow, receiving the blessed, as they are brought up to him by angels. Several figures are attached to one another, ...
Read More
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1840 edition. Excerpt: ... however, will always offer a remarkable specimen of the highly drastic quality of the artist's imagination. One of the least satisfactory productions is a sketch, Christ enthroned on a rainbow, receiving the blessed, as they are brought up to him by angels. Several figures are attached to one another, hanging at full length, by which disagreeable lines are produced, and the whole involuntarily calls to mind a mass of worms creeping amongst one another. So much the more brilliant is the so-styled small Last Judgment in the Munich Gallery. Very happily, and with a proper feeling of his own powers, Rubens has here given only a corner in the background to the Blessed, whose heavenly calm and ethereal existence he was incapable of expressing; and he has devoted the whole of the remaining space to the fall of the Damned, his true sphere. Whilst the devils are dragging the condemned into the abyss, the angel Michael is hurling his lightning at them from above. In spite of the confusion in the falling figures, amongst which the boldest foreshortenings and every variety of attitude are hazarded with success, the separate groups are easily distinguishable, and the whole produces an admirable effect by the broad manner in which the light is managed. The colouring is powerful, but not extravagant; the treatment particularly easy and clever. I agree with many other amateurs of the fine arts, that the much-praised Last Judgment in the same gallery does not merit the celebrity which it has long enjoyed; for, apart from the theatrical attitude of Christ, the resurrection of the flesh in the clumsy bodies of the blessed has by far too great a preponderance in proportion to the insignificant expression of the faces; and however well such massive bodies...
Read Less
