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| STRUDWICK. | Dixon, photo. THE RAMPARTS OF GOD’S HOUSE. |
| (By permission of Wm. Imrie, Esq., the owner of the picture.) | |
His pictures differ in their whole character from those of the masters of the Quattrocento. In Botticelli, also, the young foliage grows green and flaunts in its exuberant abundance; but in Burne-Jones the vegetation suggests one of those immense forests in Sumatra or Java. All the plants are luxuriant and resplendent in colour, and seem to swoon in their own opulent, plethoric life. Every tree creates an impression of having shot up in swift and wanton growth under a tropical sun. Rank parasitic plants trail from stem to stem, and garlands of climbers grow in a luxuriant tangle round the branches.
And in proportion as the vegetation is luxuriant and sensuous the human figures are wasted and languishing. The severe charm, rigidity, and demureness of the Quattrocento is weakened into lackadaisical melancholy. The dreamy bliss of Botticelli is transposed into sanctified solemnity, delicate fragility, a voluptuous lassitude, a gentle weariness of the world. When he paints ancient sibyls, they are touched at once by the unearthly asceticism of the Middle Ages seeking refuge from the world, and the melancholy, anæmic lassitude of the close of the nineteenth century. If he paints a Venus she does not stand out victorious in her nudity, but wears a heavy brocaded robe, and around her lie the symbols of Christian martyrdom, palms, and perhaps a lyre. It is not the fairness of her body that makes her goddess of love, but only the dim mystery of her radiant eyes. She is not the Olympian who entered into frolicsome adventure with the war-god Mars amid the laughter of the heavenly gods, for in her conventional humiliation she is rather like the beautiful dæmon of the Middle Ages who, upon her journey into exile, passed by the cross where the Son of Man was hanging, and tasted all the bitterness of the years. In their delicate features his Madonnas have a gentle sadness rarely found in the Italian masters. Even the angels, who were roguish and wayward in the Quattrocento, do their spiriting with ceremonious gravity, and a subdued melancholy underlies their devotional reverence. In Botticelli they are fresh, youthful figures, lightly girdled, and with fluttering locks and swelling robes and limber bodies, whether they float around the Madonna in blissful revelry or look up to the Child Christ in their rapt ecstasy. But in Burne-Jones they are devout, sombre, deeply earnest beings, gazing as thoughtfully and dreamily as though they had already known all the affliction of the world. Their limbs seem paralysed, and their gesture weary. It is not possible to look at one of his pictures without being reminded of the Florentines of the fifteenth century, and yet the spectator at once recognises that they are the work of Burne-Jones. He is even opposed to Rossetti, his lord and master, through this element of melancholy: the intoxication of opium is followed by the sober awakening.
Rossetti’s women are dazzling and glorious figures of a modern and deliberately cruel beauty—sisters of Messalina, Phædra, and Faustina. He delineates them as luxuriant beings with supple and splendid bodies, long white necks, and snowily gleaming breasts; with full and fragrant hair, ardent, yearning eyes, and demoniacally passionate lips. Their mother is the Venus Verticordia whom Rossetti so often painted. Cruel in their love as one of the blind forces of nature, they are like that water-sprite with her song and her red coral mouth dragged from the sea in a fishing-net, as an old French fabliau tells, and so fair that every man who beheld her was seized by the love of her, but died when he clasped her in his arms. What they love in man is his physical strength, his face and sinews of bronze. Only the strong man who loves them with overpowering madness, like a stormy wind, can bend them to his will. Swinburne has sung of “the lips intertwisted and bitten, where the foam is as blood,” of
| “The heavy white limbs and the cruel Red mouth like a venomous flower.” |
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| STRUDWICK. | Dixon, photo. THE TEN VIRGINS. |
| (By permission of William Imrie, Esq., the owner of the picture.) | |