Tum pietate gravem ac meritis, si forte virum quem
Conspexere, silent, adrectisque auribus adstant:
Æn. I.
full of confidence in God, he faces down the barbarian: the two Apostles descend not with the air of slaughtering angels, but (if sacred may be compared with profane) like Jove, whose very nod shakes Olympus.
Algardi, in his celebrated representation of the same story, done in bas-relief on an altar in St. Peter’s church at Rome, was either too negligent, or too weak, to give this active tranquillity of his great predecessor to the figures of his Apostles. There they appear like messengers of the Lord of Hosts: here like human warriors with mortal arms.
How few of those we call connoisseurs have ever been able to understand, and sincerely to admire, the grandeur of expression in the St. Michael of Guido, in the church of the Capuchins at Rome! they prefer commonly the Archangel of Concha, whose face glows with indignation and revenge[12]; whereas Guido’s Angel, after having overthrown the fiend of God and man, hovers over him unruffled and undismayed.
Thus, to heighten the hero of The Campaign, victorious Marlborough, the British poet paints the avenging Angel hovering over Britannia with the like serenity and awful calmness.
The royal gallery at Dresden contains now, among its treasures, one of Raphael’s best pictures, witness Vasari, &c. a Madonna with the Infant; St. Sixtus and St. Barbara kneeling, one on each side, and two Angels in the fore-part.
It was the chief altar-piece in the cloister of St. Sixtus at Piacenza, which was crouded by connoisseurs, who came to see this Raphael, in the same manner as Thespis was in the days of old, for the sake of the beautiful Cupid of Praxiteles.