The golden air is thick with suggestions
of dim celestial faces, but nothing mars the imposing solitude of the
Queen of Heaven, shrined alone, throned in the luminous azure. Surely no
man ever understood or interpreted like this grand Andalusian the power
that the worship of woman exerts on the religions of the world. All the
passionate love that has been poured out in all the ages at the feet of
Ashtaroth and Artemis and Aphrodite and Freya found visible form and
color at last on that immortal canvas where, with his fervor of religion
and the full strength of his virile devotion to beauty, he created, for
the adoration of those who should follow him, this type of the perfect
Feminine,--
"Thee! standing loveliest in the open heaven! Ave Maria! only Heaven and
Thee!"
There are some dozens more of Murillo here almost equally remarkable,
but I cannot stop to make an unmeaning catalogue of them. There is a
charming Gypsy Fortune-teller, whose wheedling voice and smile were
caught and fixed in some happy moment in Seville; an Adoration of the
Shepherds, wonderful in its happy combination of rigid truth with the
warmest glow of poetry; two Annunciations, rich with the radiance that
streams through the rent veil of the innermost heaven,--lights painted
boldly upon lights, the White Dove sailing out of the dazzling
background of celestial effulgence,--a miracle and mystery of theology
repeated by a miracle and mystery of art.
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