Symonds, John Addington, 1840-1893 / 2008-09-04 00:00:00

Sodoma's Sebastian is but Hyacinth or Hylas, transpierced with
arrows, so that pain and martyrdom add pathos to his poetry of
youthfulness. Lionardo's S. John is a Faun of the forest, ivy-crowned and
laughing, on whose lips the word "Repent" would be a gleeful paradox. For
the painters of the full Renaissance, Roman martyrs and Olympian
deities--the heroes of the _Acta Sanctorum_, and the heroes of Greek
romance--were alike burghers of one spiritual city, the city of the
beautiful and human. What exquisite and evanescent fragrance was educed
from these apparently diverse blossoms by their interminglement and
fusion--how the high-wrought sensibilities of the Christian were added to
the clear and radiant fancies of the Greek, and how the frank sensuousness
of the Pagan gave body and fulness to the floating wraiths of an ascetic
faith--remains a miracle for those who, like our master Lionardo, love to
scrutinise the secrets of twin natures and of double graces. There are not
a few for whom the mystery is repellent, who shrink from it as from
Hermaphroditus. These will always find something to pain them in the art
of the Renaissance.
Having co-ordinated the Christian and Pagan traditions in its work of
beauty, painting could advance no farther. The stock of its sustaining
motives was exhausted. A problem that preoccupied the minds of thinking
men at this epoch was how to harmonise the two chief moments of human
culture, the classical and the ecclesiastical.
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