The humblest, equally with
the noblest dreamer, was preserved from it; and that their eyes
naturally saw more beautifully than ours seems to be the only
explanation. Ugliness must have always existed; but Florentine eyes
did not see ugliness. Or did their eyes see it, and did they disdain
it? Do they owe their art to a wise festheticism, or to a fortunate
limitation of sight? These are questions that none may answer, but
which rise up in our mind and perplex us when we enter the New
Gallery; for verily it would seem, from the dream pictures there, that
a time once existed upon earth when the world was fair as a garden,
and life was a happy aspiration. In the fifteenth century the world
seems to have been made of gold, jewellery, pictures, embroidered
stuffs, statues, and engraved weapons; in the fifteenth century the
world seems to have been inhabited only by nobles and prelates; and
the only buildings that seem to have existed were palaces and
cathedrals. Then Art seemed for all men, and life only for
architecture, painting, carving, and engraving long rapiers; and
length of time for monks to illuminate great missals in the happy
solitude of their cells, and for nuns to weave embroideries and to
stitch jewelled vestments.
The Florentines loved their children as dearly as we do ours; but in
their pictures there is but the Divine Child. They loved girls and
gallantries as well as we do; but in their pictures there are but the
Virgin and a few saints.
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