DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61252#0278
234
THE GROSVENOR GALLERY.
such principles, pronounce Rubens one of the greatest
painters in the world. We could entertain no very ex-
alted idea of the taste of one who could prefer Rubens to
Raphael, but we should feel inclined to compassionate
those who could not understand and appreciate the former.
Pleasure, and pleasure of a most vivid kind, is necessarily
shut out from such a mind.
“ To venture to judge Rubens, we ought to have seen
many of his pictures. His defects may be acknowledged
once for all; they are, in all senses, gross, open, palpable.
His florid colour, dazzling and garish in its indiscriminate
excess; his exaggerated redundant forms; his coarse alle-
gories ; his historical improprieties; his vulgar and prosaic
versions of the loftiest and most delicate creations of
poetry;—let all these be granted; but this man painted
that sublime History, almost faultless in conception and in
costume, the ‘ Decius’ in the Lichtenstein Gallery. This
man, who has been called unpoetical, and who was a born
poet—if ever there was one—conceived that magnificent
epic, the Battle yf the Amazons ; that divine lyric, the
Virgin Mary trampling down Sin and the Dragon, in
the Munich Gallery, which might be styled a Hymn in
honour of the Virgin, only painted instead of sung; and
those tenderest moral poems, the St. Theresa pleading for
the Souls in Purgatory; and the little sketch of ‘ War/
in the Lichtenstein Gallery, where a woman sits desolate
on the black wide heath, with dead bodies and implements
of war heaped in shadowy masses around her; while, just
seen against the lurid streak of light left by the setting
sun, the battle rages in the far distance. In both these
pictures, the moral and the sentiment are so exquisitely
pure and true, and conveyed to the mind and to the heart
with such comprehensive and immediate effect, that they
might be compared to some of the sonnets of Filicaja.
Look but at the thirteen hundred pictures, all the product
THE GROSVENOR GALLERY.
such principles, pronounce Rubens one of the greatest
painters in the world. We could entertain no very ex-
alted idea of the taste of one who could prefer Rubens to
Raphael, but we should feel inclined to compassionate
those who could not understand and appreciate the former.
Pleasure, and pleasure of a most vivid kind, is necessarily
shut out from such a mind.
“ To venture to judge Rubens, we ought to have seen
many of his pictures. His defects may be acknowledged
once for all; they are, in all senses, gross, open, palpable.
His florid colour, dazzling and garish in its indiscriminate
excess; his exaggerated redundant forms; his coarse alle-
gories ; his historical improprieties; his vulgar and prosaic
versions of the loftiest and most delicate creations of
poetry;—let all these be granted; but this man painted
that sublime History, almost faultless in conception and in
costume, the ‘ Decius’ in the Lichtenstein Gallery. This
man, who has been called unpoetical, and who was a born
poet—if ever there was one—conceived that magnificent
epic, the Battle yf the Amazons ; that divine lyric, the
Virgin Mary trampling down Sin and the Dragon, in
the Munich Gallery, which might be styled a Hymn in
honour of the Virgin, only painted instead of sung; and
those tenderest moral poems, the St. Theresa pleading for
the Souls in Purgatory; and the little sketch of ‘ War/
in the Lichtenstein Gallery, where a woman sits desolate
on the black wide heath, with dead bodies and implements
of war heaped in shadowy masses around her; while, just
seen against the lurid streak of light left by the setting
sun, the battle rages in the far distance. In both these
pictures, the moral and the sentiment are so exquisitely
pure and true, and conveyed to the mind and to the heart
with such comprehensive and immediate effect, that they
might be compared to some of the sonnets of Filicaja.
Look but at the thirteen hundred pictures, all the product