PAINTERS AND WRITERS MIX DATES.
Artists Have Portrayed Abraham Threatening
Isaac with a Blunderbuss, and
Romans Smoking Pipes.
Whether it be due to ignorance or careless impatience, it is true that many of the greatest writers and painters have been guilty of the most surprising anachronisms. Thus Shakespeare introduces cannon into the play of "Hamlet," and in "Julius Cæsar" reference is made to the striking of the clock, though striking clocks were not invented until fourteen hundred years after Cæsar's death. Schiller, in his "Piccolomini," refers to lightning-conductors—at least one hundred and fifty years before they were invented. Instances might be added almost indefinitely.
The anachronisms of painters are more noticeable, as a rule, than those of writers. In "The Fancies of Fact" is the following compilation of blunders by artists:
Tintoretto, in a picture of the Children of Israel gathering manna, has taken the precaution to arm them with the modern invention of guns. Cigoli painted the aged Simeon at the circumcision of the Infant Saviour; and, as aged men in these days wear spectacles, the artist has shown his sagacity by placing them on Simeon's nose.
In a picture by Verrio of Christ healing the sick, the lookers-on are represented as standing with periwigs on their heads. To match, or rather to exceed, this ludicrous representation, Dürer has painted the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden by an angel in a dress fashionably trimmed with flounces.
The same painter, in his scene of Peter denying Christ, represents a Roman soldier very comfortably smoking a pipe of tobacco.
A Dutch painter, in a picture of the Wise Men worshiping the Holy Child, has drawn one of them in a large white surplice, and in boots and spurs, and he is in the act of presenting to the child a model of a Dutch man-of-war.
In a Dutch picture of Abraham offering up his son, instead of the patriarch's "stretching forth his hand and taking the knife," as the Scriptures inform us, he is represented as using a more effectual and modern instrument; he is holding to Isaac's head a blunderbuss.
A French artist has drawn, with true French taste, the Lord's Supper, with the table ornamented with tumblers filled with cigar-lighters; and, as if to crown the list of these absurd and ludicrous anachronisms, the Garden of Eden has been drawn with Adam and Eve in all their primeval simplicity and virtue, while near them, in full costume, is seen a hunter with a gun, shooting ducks.