Identifier: spellofitaly00maso (find matches)
Title: The spell of Italy
Year: 1909 (1900s)
Authors: Mason, Caroline Atwater, 1853-1939
Subjects: Italy -- Description and travel
Publisher: Boston : L. C. Page & company
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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, preemptingthe Saints to bless, the angels to protect, the Virginto crown our own city, has a curious irony as onelooks about to-day on Sienas empty streets andforsaken palaces. What a spur it gave to art, though,in its day, and how one must be for ever gratefulto that impulse when we see a man like Bazzi, IISodoma, who could paint falsely, who could evenbetray the best traditions of Sienese art, promptedto paint so nobly, so truly an ideal of Christianknighthood as in the St. Victor in the Sala del GranConsigho. Endless are the art treasures of these signorialhalls. Innumerable are the balzane (Sienas blackand white shield), over doors and windows, andeverywhere the Lupa and other insignia are exalted.Wearied with endless symbol and allegory, we cameout upon the Piazza, the Campo where the raceswere so soon to be run, crossed to the Fonte Gaia(poor copy of Delia Quercias beautiful originals, infragments now in the Opera del Duomo), andlooked back. There with a thrill we saw above us
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ST. VICTOR, BY IL SODOMA. Siena the Sorceress 265 that thing of soaring grace, the Torre del Mangia,rising bare and fearless above all the riot of colourand figure within, and we found it greater thanthese. The Picture Gallery, or Belle Arti, of Siena isarranged in a particularly lucid chronological se-quence. From the thirteenth century painters of theStanza Prima with their strong Byzantine set andhard archaic figures, on through the lovely but stillprimitive conceptions of the Lorenzetti, to theexquisite mysticism and shadowless sweetness ofSano di Pietro; then on to Neroccio in full breadthof Renaissance power, and to Bazzi, the prodigallygifted Lombard follower of Leonardo, imported bythe Sienese about the middle of the sixteenth cen-tury, — thus proceeding we felt that we had watcheda tight-closed bud of stiff, rough calyx and littlepromise grow by hardly perceptible degrees, to burstat last into bloom of colour, grace, and life. Thewhole story of Italian Art was displayed in

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