Today we call them "effective" subjects; we find
they produce shocks and tremors; we think it braces us to shudder, and we
think that Art is a kind of emotional pill; we measure it quantitatively,
and say that we "know what we like." And doubtless there is something
piquant in the quivering produced, for example, by the sight of white
innocence fluttering helpless in a grey shadow of lust. So long as the
Bible remained a god that piquancy was found in a _Massacre of the
Innocents_; in our own time we find it in a _Faust and Gretchen_,
in the Dore Gallery, or in the Royal Academy. It was a like appreciation
of the certain effect of vivid contrasts as powerful didactic agents
(coupled with, or drowning, a something purer and more devout) which had
inspired those most beautiful and distinctive of all the symbols of
Catholicism, the _Adoration of the Kings_, the Christ-child cycle,
and which raised the Holy Child and Maid-Mother to their place above the
mystic tapers and the Cross. Naturally the Old Testament, that garner of
grim tales, proved a rich mine: _David and Golias, Susanna and the
Elders_, the _Sacrifice of Isaac, Jethro's daughter_.
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