Читать книгу Angels in Art онлайн
18 страница из 19
Rembrandt, too, painted wonderful angels. No adjective ordinarily applied to such pictures is suited to these. They are poetical, unearthly apparitions, and once studied, can no more be forgotten than can some of Dante’s and Shakepeare’s immortal lines.
Modern artists have, speaking generally, wisely followed the examples of old masters in their treatment of angels. The poet Blake, however, is a notable exception to this rule. He painted angels that surely “sing to heaven,” while they float upon the air which their diaphanous drapery scarcely displaces, and seem about to vanish and become a portion of the ether which surrounds them.
I cannot better close this chapter than by quoting what Mr. Ruskin writes of the earlier and later representations of angels.
He says of the earlier pictures that there is “a certain confidence in the way in which angels trust to their wings, very characteristic of a period of bold and simple conception. Modern science has taught us that a wing cannot be anatomically joined to a shoulder; and, in proportion as painters approach more and more to the scientific, as distinguished from the contemplative state of mind, they put the wings of their angels on more timidly, and dwell with greater emphasis on the human form, with less upon the wings, until these last become a species of decorative appendage,—a mere sign of an angel.