CHAPTER XV.
THE SACRED PAINTERS AND COMPOSERS.
IMAGES AND PICTURES IN CHURCHES.
The Romish Church has from the beginning looked favourably on the practice of adorning churches with images and pictures of sacred persons. At Nola, in 460, the cathedral of St. Felix had wall paintings of stories taken from the Old Testament. In 752 a council of the Church required images to be erected in churches, and worship of these was inculcated as a remembrance of the holy lives and conversation of the dead. The Iconoclast movement (see ante, p. 129) shook faith in the practice for about a century; but the Council of Nicæa, in 787, closed the controversy by approving the practice, and the opposition died out in 842. There seems no limit to the number or subjects of the wall paintings, and the Popes greatly encouraged them. In England at the Reformation images were directed to be taken down and destroyed. Very few wall paintings are found in any English churches, and they are of small value or importance.
THE RUNAGATE MONK PAINTERS.
“I learned,” says Hugo of St. Victor, “from a certain prudent and religious man that there are some kinds of people who can scarcely ever be retained with order in the religious life. These are painters, physicians, and buffoons, who are accustomed to travel in different countries. Men of this description can hardly ever be stable. The art of painting is very delightful; for when a painter has painted a church, a chapter-room, a refectory, or any cabinets, if leave be granted to him, on being invited he goes soon to another monastery for the sake of painting. He paints the works of Christ upon a wall, but it never occurs to him to imitate the works in his own life and manners. So with the medical art; it needs an abundance of aromatic plants and medicines. When any one near the church falls sick, he is asked to go to see the patient, and the abbot can hardly refuse permission. Then he is always making experiments on things uncertain and making fallacious statements. Whereas a true monk should never speak out on anything. So it is with buffoons and jesters, who are always bent on rambling. The Fathers of the Council in the eighth century well decreed that monasteries should be the habitations of men labouring to serve God in silence and peace, and not mere receptacles of arts which minister to pleasure—not places for poets, minstrels, and musicians, but for men praying, reading, and praising God.”
THE PICTURES IN MONASTERIES.
The monasteries were the nurseries of the arts of painting, sculpture, and music. Many of them contained exquisite frescoes of sacred subjects. Ghiberti, the most ancient historian of art in Italy, spoke with enthusiasm of a great composition with which Ambrose de Lorenzo had covered the walls of a cloister, in which he represented the life of a Christian missionary. First a young man taking the habit of a monk; then entreating to be sent to convert the Saracens; then the departure and arrival before the Sultan, who orders him to be scourged; then condemning him to die; the decapitation; then a horrible tempest, during which vast trees are torn up by the roots and the people fly in terror. In the refectory of the convent of San Salvi, near Florence, Andrea del Sarto painted four figures of saints and the Last Supper; and during the siege in 1529, when the Florentines were compelled to demolish all buildings and reached this great fresco, they were struck dumb and motionless with admiration. One holy brother, lately in the Escurial monastery, guiding from cell to cell and room to room a British painter (Wilkie), pointed out that glorious work of Titian the Lord’s Last Supper, beautiful as when it first graced the refectory. As both stood with eyes transfixed at that masterpiece, the holy father said to the stranger: “Here daily do we sit, thanks given to God for daily bread; and here pondering the mischiefs of these restless times, and thinking of my brethren dead and gone, I not seldom gaze upon this solemn company unmoved by shock of circumstance or lapse of years, until I cannot but believe that they, these pictures, are in truth the substance and we the shadows.”
THE SACRO MONTE DE VARALLO.