Page:The Works of J. W. von Goethe, Volume 12.djvu/138

128 directed to the practical part, to the subject, and the general treatment of it.

St. Georgio is a gallery of good pictures,—all altarpieces, and all remarkable, if not of equal value. But what subjects were the hapless artists obliged to paint! And for whom? Perhaps a shower of manna thirty feet long and twenty feet high, with the miracle of the loaves as a companion. What could be made of these subjects? Hungry men falling on little grains, and a countless multitude of others, to whom bread is handed. The artists have racked their invention in order to get something striking out of such wretched subjects. And yet, stimulated by the urgency of the case, genius has produced some beautiful things. An artist who had to paint St. Ursula with the eleven thousand virgins has got over the difficulty cleverly enough. The saint stands in the foreground, as if she had conquered the country. She is very noble, like an Amazonian virgin, and without any enticing charms: on the other hand, her troop is shown descending from the ships, and moving in procession at a diminishing distance. The Assumption of the Virgin, by Titian, in the dome, has become much blackened; and it is a thought worthy of praise, that, at the moment of her apotheosis, she looks, not toward heaven, but toward her friends below.

In the Gherardini Gallery I found some very fine things by Orbitto, and for the first time became acquainted with this meritorious artist. At a distance we only hear of the first artists, and then we are often contented with names only; but when we draw nearer to this starry sky, and the luminaries of the second and third magnitude also begin to twinkle, each one coming forward, and occupying his proper place in the whole constellation, then the world becomes wide, and art becomes rich. I must here commend the conception of one of the pictures. Samson has gone to sleep