e; for it displays to an
extraordinary degree that juxtaposition of the most conventionally
idealistic, pious decorativeness with the realism straightforward,
unreflecting, and heartless to the point of becoming perfectly
grotesque. The fresco is divided into two scenes: on the one side the
crucifixion, the mystic actors of the drama, on the other the holy men
admitted to its contemplation. A sense that holy things ought to be
old-fashioned, a respect for Byzantine inanity which invariable haunted
the Giottesques in their capacity of idealistic decorators, of men who
replaced with frescoes the solemn lifeless splendours of mosaic; this
kind of artistico-religious prudery has made Angelico, who was able to
foreshorten powerfully the brawny crucified thieves, represent the
Saviour dangling from the cross bleached, boneless, and shapeless, a
thing that is not dead because it has never been alive. The holy persons
around stand rigid, vacant, against their blue nowhere of background,
with vague expanses of pink face looking neither one way nor the other;
mere modernized copies of the strange, goggle-eyed, vapid beings on the
old Italian mosaics. This is not a representation of the actual reality
of the crucifixion, like Tintoret's superb picture at S. Rocco, or
Duerer's print, or so many others, which show the hill, the people, the
hangman, the ladders and ropes and hammers and tweezers: it is a sort of
mystic repetition of it; subjective, if I may say so; existing only in
the contemplation of the saints on the opposite side, who are spectators
only in the sense that a contemplative Christian may be said to be the
mystic spectator of the Passion. The thing for the painter to represent
is fervent contemplation, ecstatic realization of the past by the force
of ardent love and belief; the condition of mind of St. Francis, St.
Catherine of Siena, Madame Guyon: it is the revelation of the great
tragedy of heaven to the soul of the mystic. Now, how does Fra Angelico
represent this? A row of saints, founders of orders, kneel one behind
the other, and by their side stand apostles and doctors of the Church;
admitting them to the sight of the super-human, with the gesture, the
bland, indifferent vacuity of the Cameriere Segreto or Monsignore who
introduces a troop of pilgrims to the Pope; they are privileged persons,
they respect, they keep up decorum, they raise their eyes and compress
their lips with ceremonious reverence; but, Lord!