File:Mediaeval Sicily, aspects of life and art in the middle ages (1910) (14592330680).jpg

Identifier: cu31924081258430 (find matches)
Title: Mediaeval Sicily, aspects of life and art in the middle ages
Year: 1910 (1910s)
Authors: Waern, Cecilia, 1853-
Subjects: Art Art, Medieval
Publisher: London, Duckworth & co
Contributing Library: Cornell University Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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There are two of them at work at oncein one opljicio, seated cross-legged, like busy littlebrownies, one under the cart, one between theshafts, with a huge pot of paint beside them.)Every successive step or finer stroke is taught—orshown ; it is all a matter ot convention or tradition,which they imbibe with the atmosphere andthe smell of the turpentine (progress determinedby the hopes of a rise in salary). These Palermitanworkshops are of special interest to the student ofart as still showing, one feels, what must have beenthe conditions on a larger scale of the medievalworkshops, with their community of aim anddivision of labour. Even the High Art representedby the picture panels is not all, as we shall see, thework of the masters own hand. There is not much roon^for pure painted orna-ment on the donkey-carts ; all is predetermined bycarving, or reduced to splotches, bold concentricdashes, or the narrowest of borders. On someolder carts, however, there is a painted composite318 X x
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0^ o b g h Q w <a, SURVIVALS border on the part of the shaft under the body otthe cart. The decorative tradition here shown—or assert-ing itself on the borders that have burst out intoblossom on those modern interlopers, the traint-—isunmistakably a continuation of the Arabo-Sicilianstyle of the late medieval palaces as best seen andstudied in the Palazzo Chiaramonte. The current oftradition, however, seems to have run undergroundin some mysterious way during a century or two. Painted timber roofs were doubtless, as suggestedabove (p. 256), the fashion in smaller houses inconservative Palermo long after the late Renaissancehad triumphed elsewhere, but by degrees even thesedisappeared, and there is no painting on any otherkind of objects preserved as far as I know, thatactually proves the existence, in the eighteenthcentury, of a rough-and-ready school of decorativepainting on a par with the present-day workshops. The Ethnographical Museum, now at last calledinto being by the in

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