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Music from the South. 79
natural material as may have existed among the subject folk of Italy.
Because, to continue, there is danger, with this patronage of art, of insincerity, if not decay, entering into the artist's thoughts, and consequent seeming and conventionality into the works which arc their product. I think this may be perceived throughout the whole story of Italian art. Michael Angelo's plan of St. Peter's, after having been altered again and again by thwarting influences, could be conclusively spoiled in what should have been its main feature, by the mean and heavy frontispiece of Carlo Madcrno : his sculptures, the only ones in which the Titans of antique sculpture were matched by a Titan as strong in his own modern world as they were in their mythologies, could be displaced in favour by the fluttering, meretricious sentimentalities of Bernini. And so, from this illustration to come into our own peculiar world, in the dealings of Italian patronage with music, I have detected no settled recognition of a dawn as of an awakening; nor of a morn as a beginning; nor of a noon as of a fulfilment; nor of an afternoon as an enrichment; nor of the more tranquil glories of evening leading on to the solemn splendours of night: no" fixed |
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