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Untitled Article
the suite . of galleries . Here 19 ; aft'Otnef' path entered , anothlit s vis& of ideas shows
iJSelf , or rather the light wlforefty such a vista maybe di $ c 6 Veried is here offered to Jfcttir hand . It will be found in good taste to comment very little on these Holv families :
the transcendent character of the heads , united with the truth of the maternal and childish , renders this very difficult and very useless . It is only as exhibiting an era that we mention them . Art seems here
to have reached , as the power of the Pope had done immediately before , the summit of its ( perhaps possible ) elevation , the verge of its hemisphere . Raphael , as it were , stands like Joshua on the
mountains , the old world behind him , through which the painters of the mystic works and himself in his youth had travelled , with the supernatural pillar of fire which had
guided and lighted them still burning ; * before him the promised land , a land of nature tinder the light of the sun . The feeling which was instinctive in the artists of previous times is here
definedwrought out as a result , a concerted understanding . The fathers painted under so perfect a belief of their story as to feel no anxiety to elevate or to &rgue it : but the very pow ^ r which i < s now employed in abstracting the expression of the face ^ ° f supernatural agents , or rattier in combining ? artft and heaven in their els-
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/ i ^ ^ an ^ thesu ^<^ iag [ ges ] t dojrtect fits truth . There s ^ ms ttn j ^ fm | t | ng application of reason : to a ! mat * ter of revelation . Ihe
modern painter does not teM the story as the Evangelist ^ would have told it , who would not have hesitated to have described the Virgin destitute of beauty , had they believed her so . The Mater Dei of the
past period was a woman possessing , in the rigidity of figure , an air somewhat akin to that of the Egyptian statues which separated her from the association of life . This figure had a golden circle , or
perhaps a circle of stars hovering over her head . These symbols are now lost , along with the advantage resulting from deficient style . So long as the signs of things stood for the things themselves , we
acknowledge a wholeness of idea in the treatment of subjects of superhuman nature— -a ( harmony between the characters represented and the manner of representing them . But whenever a representation of nature
is substituted for these symbols a parallel is substituted for a type ; and we dQubt the dogmas in whose aid such representation is employed , because there is an implied
acknowledgment that it is not possible to treat them but jbly analogy . We should , doubtless , worship Raphael ' s mdtftejr mpre fervently ' than any pth&i , but it would not be as the
mother of Jesus , as the beihg who sat in an important place
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P nt ^ S » -inps towards a rfght ^ jl pgr&jiati ^^ tfiptufes *
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 1, 1837, page 272, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1836/page/47/
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