“O Christ! Thou art the salvation, the Creator, full of goodness, and the Redeemer of the world. Only-begotten Son of the Father, Author of the life of the world, Thou didst allow thyself to be buried; Thou hast trodden the pathway of death to give us the blessings of salvation.
“The gates of hell have fallen before their Master, and chaos has been seized with terror at the inrush of light.
“Deliver the imprisoned souls from the captivity of hell, and make to ascend on high all those who have gone down into the abyss.
“Thou snatchest from the dungeon of death a teeming host which, when set free, follows in the footsteps of its deliverer.
“O holy King! the radiant splendour of Thy triumph shines forth when the purified souls emerge from the sacred bath of purgatory. They, resplendent in their newly-acquired liberty, array themselves in robes of innocence, and the Shepherd contemplates with joy His flock, made white as snow.”
This divine triumph, which the artist has so vividly depicted, and of which the poet sings with such enthusiasm, was brought home to every Christian by the aid of the imagination under the guidance of faith. Nurtured in the doctrine of the Holy Scriptures, the people had got to be familiar with the wholesome teaching of St. Paul, when he so eloquently drew a comparison between the seed sown in the ground and the corruptible body of the Christian changed into the incorruptible. All men at that time steadfastly believed in the truth of those sublime words: “The body is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption: it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power: it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.”
These thoughts, which softened the sense of sorrow at death in the days of deep religious faith, have been beautifully expressed by the great painter of the Middle Ages, so fitly named Angelico. In his splendid picture, “The Last Judgment,” the grouping of the elect is a chef-d’œuvre of Christian art. The green grass, the flowers springing up on all sides, bring before the mind the resurrection, and the elevated spiritualism of the faces which are depicted in this exquisite scene carries the imagination into an ideal world. Man, with the belief in a life to come, looked on death but as a sleep stealing over the traveller, wearied with his pilgrimage towards the heavenly country. The place of burial became the place of sleep (which is the meaning of the word cemetery). The corruption of the tomb was rendered poetical by comparing it to the corruption of the seed, which decomposed only to be quickened and to develop into a verdant stem, branching out into sweet-scented and graceful flowers. The fear of yielding to the lusts of the flesh drove the faithful into the extreme rigour of penance, but, when death had dispelled all danger, the body became an object of pious worship: it was encompassed with floods of light and clouds of incense before being committed to the earth, which had been blessed and consecrated to make it a fitting receptacle for so precious a deposit—for faith saw in imagination the splendour with which it would one day be clothed; and, to help the imagination, art placed before the gaze the ineffable visions of the Apocalypse.
Fragment of Angelico's picture, the Day of Judgement, XVth century. Florence, Academy of Fine-Arts.
Van Eyck has allegorically treated this great subject of the Resurrection (Fig. 408), with as much approach to what the Church believes to be the truth, and perhaps as artistically, as the painter of Fiesole. Amidst a landscape flooded with light, bright with verdure and flowers, the Mystic Lamb, standing upon an altar and shedding his exhaustless blood into the chalice, is being greeted with homage and hymns of praise by the celestial host. Upon the front of the altar is the inscription, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (Ecce Agnus Dei, qui tollet peccata mundi). Around the altar, angels form a circle; two of them are scattering incense over the Lamb, while twelve others, six on each side, are bearing the instruments of the passion, and singing the praises of the Divine Victim. In front of the altar, in the foreground, bubbles up a fountain, which, in the language of the Apocalypse, is thus described, “The Lamb shall be their shepherd, He shall lead them to fountains of living water, and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.” M. Alfred Michiels, in his “Histoire de la Peinture Flamande,” declares that “no allegory has ever been painted with greater skill.”