Studio: international art (78.1919)

STUDIO-TALK

FRESCO PAINTING IN THE CHURCH
OF SAN ANTONIO DE LA FLORIDA
BY FRANCISCO GOYA Y LUCIENTES-

whom wings have been given. The back-
ground against which these figures stand
out is a landscape which recalls the great
rural scenes of the master. 000

The influence of these frescoes upon the
decorative painters of the nineteenth cen-
tury has been immense, especially as far
as French artists are concerned. Puvis de
Chavannes owes to them perhaps his most
luminous compositions. Certain critics
have imagined to themselves the sceptic
Goya as painting religious scenes actuated
solely by an exorbitant desire for popularity,
but it is not fair to allow such uncharitable
thoughts to diminish the glory of these
frescoes of San Antonio. Goya had an
innate genius for decorative painting, and a
facility of draughtsmanship which enabled
him to employ that tendency in no matter
what genre, and here we have no doubt the
reason why, when desired to enhance by
artistry the beauty of a cult he himself did
not practise, he accepted the task with the

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joyful desire of creating a work of beauty
without thought for the use to which his art
was to be dedicated. 000

In an epoch when Winckelmann was able
without undue exaggeration to call painters
“ the corruptors of the arts/' Goya stands
as the solitary exception—and what an
exception ! This series of frescoes in par-
ticular seems to belong to the seventeenth
century—to the Golden Age of Spanish
painting. It is the most emotional work
of him who was so aptly surnamed Le
Grand Aragonais. One feels palpitating
in these paintings all the rich folk-lore of old
Castile. It is more than a fantasy, some-
thing other than idealization. It is, if
one may thus express oneself, the realiza-
tion of Thought of the most noble and the
most pure by Truth. In these frescoes
everything speaks of the truth in art
arrived at its highest degree, triumphing;
at the expense of the merely “ pretty ” in
order immortally to perpetuate Beauty. As.