"Sistine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Annie's room, opposite the foot of her bed. Opposite the foot of the bed in her mother's room hung a large engraving of the Sistine Madonna. I fancied that in Annie's quieter moments her eyes rested with a troubled look upon this picture, and one day, when she was in a deep sleep, I exchanged the pictures. I felt as if even lifeless canvas which ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... be seen, but in the highest regions only the head seems to remain. Raphael, who like many other people in the middle ages was gifted with a so-called second sight, pictured that condition for us in his Sistine Madonna, now in the Dresden Art Gallery, where Madonna and the Christ-child are represented as floating in a golden atmosphere and surrounded by a host of genie-heads: conditions which the occult investigator knows to be ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... you lead such a solitary life?" asked a friend of Michael Angelo. "Art is a jealous mistress," replied the artist; "she requires the whole man." During his labors at the Sistine Chapel, according to Disraeli, he refused to meet any one, even ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... moment to describe the mural for you. Firstly, its form: it was spread out across the dome like the painted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, its whole being a broad, harmonious picture that complimented itself, telling a story throughout its united branches. It was much more than a painting, though, because it stood out from the dome ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... picture! And the mistress herself, Valentina Mihailovna Sipiagina, put the finishing touch to it, gave it meaning and life. She was a tall woman of about thirty, with dark brown hair, a fresh dark complexion, resembling the Sistine Madonna, with wonderfully deep, velvety eyes. Her pale lips were somewhat too full, her shoulders perhaps too square, her hands rather too large, but, for all that, anyone seeing her as she flitted gracefully about the drawing room, bending from her slender waist ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... different kind. It is wrought with mere incisions in the stone, of which the effect may be tolerably given by single lines in a drawing. Remember, therefore, for a moment—as characteristic of culminating Italian art—Michael Angelo's fresco of the "Temptation of Eve," in the Sistine chapel, and you will be more interested in seeing the birth of Italian art, illustrated by the same subject, from St. Ambrogio, of Milan, the "Serpent beguiling Eve." [Footnote: This cut is ruder than it should be: the ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... thinking it may seem a far cry from reactions and external stimuli to loyalty, but not so by any means. The man or woman who has been led to react to the Madonna of the Chair, the Plow Oxen, or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel will experience a revival and recurrence of the reaction at every sight of the masterpiece, whether the original or a reproduction. That masterpiece has become this person's standard of art and neither argument, nor persuasion, nor sophistry can divorce ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... Sistine Madonna or a stray Angelo?" David asked. "Or a ghost? What is the matter? Is it ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... the design of Baccio, which was then held to be a very beautiful and well-planned edifice. The same master built the Great Library under the apartments of Niccola, and that chapel in the Palace that is called the Sistine, which is adorned with beautiful paintings. He also rebuilt the structure of the new Hospital of S. Spirito in Sassia (which was burnt down almost to the foundations in the year 1471), adding to it a very long loggia and all the useful conveniences that could be desired. Within the hospital, along ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... for nothing in the least except Dutch boors,—fancy, the father of Browning!—and as innocent as a child." Browning himself declared that he had not one artistic taste in common with his father—"in pictures, he goes 'souls away' to Brauwer, Ostade, Teniers ... he would turn from the Sistine Altar-piece to these—in music he desiderates a tune 'that has a story connected with it.'" Yet Browning inherited much from his father, and was ready to acknowledge his gains. In Development, one of the poems of his last volume, he ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Mr. Bob, if you were to lean the Sistine Madonna right up against the table in my room I wouldn't turn my head to look at it. And as for churches—I wouldn't accept Westminster Abbey as a gift. Tell 'em not to urge it on me, for I wouldn't ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... meditating on some great design, he closed himself up from the world, "Why do you lead so solitary a life?" asked a friend. "Art," replied the sublime artist, "Art is a jealous god; it requires the whole and entire man." During his mighty labour in the Sistine Chapel, he refused to have any communication with any person even at his own house. Such undisturbed and solitary attention is demanded even by undoubted genius as the price of performance. How then shall we deem of that feebler race who exult in occasional excellence, and who so often deceive ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... cathedral choir of men and boys—trained to sing without musical accompaniments—owes its origin to his ambition for having a choir in his own Protestant basilica at Berlin, corresponding more or less to the Pope's in the Sistine Chapel of Rome. It was he who engaged Mendelssohn as director of this choir, as well as composer; and it was the latter's successor, the director of the music of the Chapel Royal at the Prussian court, who compiled a collection of volumes containing settings ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... said Gertie Sumners, with a kind of sombre triumph. "The Sistine Chapel. I've got a print of it in my room. That's where you saw it." She leaned back against a tree trunk with her knees drawn up to her chin, and blew out clouds of smoke, and looked more than usually grey and dishevelled and in need of a bath. "In a way ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... pavement bears the story of Odysseus, and each passage-way is a Via Sacra, and every stone is old with years whose tale is told by hundreds or by thousands, and the wounded Adonis can be adored beside the tempted Christ of Sistine, and the serious beauty of the Erythean Sibyl lives beside the laughing grace of ivy-crowned Thalia, and the Jupiter Maximus frowns on the mortals made of earth's dust, and the Jehovah who has called forth woman meets ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Rome, he saw in the Sistine chapel the painting of "The Last Judgment," while listening to the wonderful music of "The Miserere," which music is only performed in Holy Week by the Pope's choir, and no one has ever been allowed to have a copy of the music or even to see it. But so accurate was little ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... and the most human of the gods. In Italy it was the tree of Jove, great father of immortals and of mankind. After the gods passed, it became the tree of the imperial Caesars. After the Caesars had passed, it was the oak that Michael Angelo in the Middle Ages scattered over the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel near the creation of man and his expulsion from Paradise—there as always the chosen tree of human desire. In Britain it was the sacred tree of Druidism: there the Arch Druid and his fellow-priests performed none of their rites without ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... weather satisfied them that Dresden was a better spot for general education than Berlin, and equally good for reading Civil Law. They were possibly right. There was nothing to study in Dresden, and no education to be gained, but the Sistine Madonna and the Correggios were famous; the theatre and opera were sometimes excellent, and the Elbe was prettier than the Spree. They could always fall back on the language. So he took a room in the household of the usual small government ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... spirit, and action. Whose is the "spirit" of the characters that we know as Micawber, Oliver Twist, Uriah Heep—is it Dickens, or have each of these characters a personal spirit, independent of their creator? Have the Venus of Medici, the Sistine Madonna, the Apollo Belvidere, spirits and reality of their own, or do they represent the spiritual and mental power of their creators? The Law of Paradox explains that both propositions are true, viewed from the proper viewpoints. Micawber is both Micawber, ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... of sea and rocks, and have, therefore, no word left to describe the emotion with which I gazed upon the exquisite, living, palpitating picture beside me. A composite photograph of all the Madonnas ever painted, from the Sistine to Bodenhausen's, could not have been more lovely, more ineffably womanly than that young girl, radiant with the divine glow of artistic delight—at least, that is my opinion, which, by the bye, I should, perhaps, ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... Seize, bogus Oriental, feathered, laced and tasseled. So much for useful presents. Now for decoration. We have three Sistine Madonnas (my particular abomination). Two, thank heaven, we can inflict on the next victims, one we have got to live with and why?—so that each of our three intimate friends will believe it his own. We have water colors and etchings which ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... Business," "Hope to the End," "The Child of our Sunday School," "Satan's Devices," and "Studies of Christian Life and Character, Hannah More." Then he saw an article about some architecture in Rome, and he read: "In the Sistine picture there is the struggle of a great mind to reduce within the possibilities of art a subject that transcends it. That mind would have shown itself to be greater, truer, at least, in its judgement of the capabilities of art, and more reverent to ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... materially assisted in your preparation for the schools either of philosophy or divinity by Raphael's 'School of Athens,' by Raphael's 'Theology,'—or by Michael Angelo's 'Judgment.' My task, to-day, is to set before you some part of the design of the first Master of the works in the Sistine Chapel; and I believe that, from his teaching, you will, even in the hour which I ask you now to give, learn what may be of true use to you in all your future labor, whether in Oxford ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... beautiful Madonna in a round picture, which is in the possession of Filippo Salviati; although it is true that it was brought to completion by Pietro himself. The same Rocco painted many pictures of Our Lady, and made many portraits, of which there is no need to speak; I will only say that in the Sistine Chapel in Rome he painted portraits of Girolamo Riario and of F. Pietro, Cardinal of San Sisto. Another disciple of Pietro was Montevarchi, who painted many pictures in San Giovanni di Valdarno; more particularly, in the Madonna, the stories of the Miracle of the Milk. He also left many works ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... themselves, being often, indeed, the true maturity of certain amiable artistic qualities. And in regard to Greek art at its best—the Parthenon—no less than to the art of the Renaissance at its best— the Sistine Chapel—the more instructive light would be derived rather from what precedes than what follows such central success, from the determination to apprehend the fulfilment of past effort rather than the eve of decline, in the critical, central moment which partakes ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... The Sistine Chapel was the most beautiful apartment in the Vatican. Its walls were covered with choicest frescos. Its ceiling, done by the wonder-working hand of Michael Angelo, was a marvel. To add still more to the beauty of ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... heroic ones, and sweeten the reverie by the toil. So far as they go, the enjoyments of the healthy body are as innocent and as ardent as those of the soul. As there is no ground of comparison, so there is no ground of antagonism. How compare a sonata and a sea-bath or measure the Sistine Madonna against a gallop across country? The best thanksgiving for each is to enjoy the other also, and educate the mind to ampler nobleness. After all, the best verdict on athletic exercises was that of the great Sully, when he said, "I was always of the same opinion with Henry ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... not wholly unsuccessful, since by dint of steady gazing he heightened his perceptive powers, whether it were for Notre Dame, the Sistine Madonna, or the Alps, each of which he took with the same seriousness. What eluded him was precisely that human element which was the primary object of his quest. He learned to recognize the beauty of ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... the Sistine Chapel, where they had had a long discussion on the merits of Michelangelo, Caesar met the painter Cortes, who came to speak ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... we give heed to any such reproach we must beware of confounding the personality of the artist or the fashion of the time with the moving spirit in both. He works always—as Michel Angelo complained that he was painting the ceiling of the Sistine—over his own head, and blinded by his own paint. The purpose that we speak of is not his petty doings and intentions, but what he unintentionally accomplishes. It is the spiritual alone that interests; and if later Art seem, by comparison, wanting in spirituality, this is partly the effect ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... variations and modernizations in every degree of earlier works. Under these circumstances it will easily be seen that the task of reconstructing a lost original from extant imitations is a very delicate and perilous one. Who could adequately appreciate the Sistine Madonna, if the inimitable touch of Raphael were known to us ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... Polish church music I must not forget to mention the famous College of the Roratists, [FOOTNOTE: The duties of these singers were to sing Rorate masses and Requiem masses for the royal family. Their name was derived from the opening word of the Introit, "Rorate coeli."] the Polish Sistine Chapel, attached to the Cracow Cathedral. It was founded in 1543 and subsisted till 1760. With the fifteenth of seventeen conductors of the college, Gregor Gorczycki, who died in 1734, passed away the last of the classical school of Polish church music. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... great predecessors and strives to emulate them; if the painter in the presence of the Sistine Madonna feels lifted and touched, so that he never can be content with poor work again; if the sculptor is ready to bend his knees in the presence of the Venus of Melos, as he sees her standing at the end of the long gallery in the Louvre; if the lover of his kind admires John Howard, and ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... to the Sistine Chapel, of course," he went on, "and to the loggia and Bramant's staircase? You saw some ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... might look like a normal man in many respects; but if the operation were performed before puberty, his development is simply arrested and remains infantile—incomplete. Only in 1878 was the practice of desexing boys to get the famous adult male soprano voices for the Sistine Choir discontinued. ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... bishops, priests, and a great many lay persons of that country, abjured the Photian schism, and addressed to Rome a solemn act of union in the name of the majority of their fellow-countrymen. Pius IX. replied on the 29th of January, 1861. He was pleased himself to consecrate in the Sistine chapel their new archbishop, Sokolski. The latter, as he renewed the profession of faith, which had been already formulated in writing at Constantinople, said to the Holy Father: "It is your work that, although dead, we are come to life, and that, being lost, we are found again." Pius ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... include all expressions of that for which so many ages of men have struggled and aspired. I vaguely hoped for this universal comity when I stood in Stonehenge, on the Acropolis in Athens, or in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. But never did I so desire it as in the cathedrals of Winchester, Notre Dame, Amiens. One winter's day I traveled from Munich to Ulm because I imagined from what the art books said that the cathedral hoarded a medieval statement of the Positivists' final synthesis, ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... Lucretia returned to Rome. November 1, 1499, she gave birth to a son, who was named, in honor of the Pope, Rodrigo. Her firstborn was baptized with great pomp November 11th in the Sistine Chapel—not the chapel now known by that name, but the one which Sixtus IV had built in S. Peter's. Giovanni Cervillon held the child in his arms, and near by were the Governor of Rome and a representative of the Emperor Maximilian. All the cardinals, ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... most celebrated portions of the Vatican; the Scala Regia, covered with frescoes of events in Papal history, the Sistine Chapel, adorned with fine frescoes by Michael Angelo, including the Last Judgment. Here the Cardinals meet to elect the Pope, and here many of the most gorgeous ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... be all right for me to look at Blake's drawings. You'd better look at the Sistine Madonna, (affectionately, after she has watched CLAIRE's face a moment) What is it, Claire? Why do you ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... the Sistine Chapel. That's the Director, old Maestro Mustafa—used to be the greatest ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... unaccompanied by his wife; the Pope struck him a heavier blow in diminishing by one-half the income that had hitherto been allowed him from the Papal treasury. But worse than the loss of foreign friends, worse even than the loss of the Sistine subsidy, was the effect which his treatment of his wife produced in the countries which he aspired to rule. His wisest followers wrote to him that he had done more to injure his cause by his conduct to Clementine ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... in my father's study of the Delphic Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel, that for a time held my heart, and—Yes, there was a girl in a tobacconist's shop in the Harbury High Street. Drawn by an irresistible impulse I used to go and buy cigarettes—and sometimes converse about the weather. But afterwards in solitude I would meditate tremendous conversations and ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... tell you. I came here to tell the rector." The grave eyes of the man, eyes whose clearness and youth seemed to be such an age-old youth and clearness as one sees in the eyes of the sibyls in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel—eyes empty of a thought of self, impersonal, serene with the serenity of a large atmosphere—the unflinching eyes of the man gazed at ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... paintings, as to real merit, in the world. They are colossal in size, and have both made the journey to Paris. Napoleon I. had them both transferred to the Louvre; but they are back again, forming the great attraction of the Vatican. The "Last Judgment," by Michael Angelo, covers one whole side of the Sistine Chapel, one of the very best of this great master's works, requiring hours of study to enable one to form a just conception of its design and merits. Raphael has a series of fifty other paintings within the walls ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... Brooks. These, and many another whom the gods have loved and dowered with gifts, rise before any retrospective glance over the comparatively recent past of Rome. Bishop Brooks passed there the Holy Week of one Lenten season, and of the Miserere in the Sistine Chapel he wrote that it was certainly the most wonderful music to which he had ever listened; ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... to Italy—for my husband had only a meager holiday from the Times: "Go to Rome! Never mind the journeys. Go! You will have three days there, you say? Well, to have walked through Rome, to have spent an hour in the Forum, another on the Palatine; to have seen the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel, and St. Peter's; to have climbed the Janiculum and looked out over the Alban hills and the Campagna—and you can do all that in three days—well!—life is not the same afterward. If you only had an afternoon in Rome it would be well ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the sonnets" was Margharita (La Fornarina), the baker's daughter, whose likeness appears in several of his most celebrated pictures. The Madonnas enumerated in ll. 22-25 are the Sistine Madonna, now in the Dresden Gallery; the Madonna di Foligno, so called because it had been painted as a votive offering for Sigismund Corti of Foligno; the Madonna del Granduca (Petti Palace, Florence) in which the Madonna is ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... the Portuguese") has not been written by men; whether the song which embodies the ideal of pure and tender passion—Adelaida—was written by Frau Beethoven; whether it was the Fornarina, or Raphael, who painted the Sistine Madonna. Nay, we have known one such heretic go so far as to lay his hands upon the ark itself, so to speak, and to defend the startling paradox that, even in physical beauty, man is the superior. He admitted, indeed, that there was a brief period of early youth when ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... pictures, she is distressed above measure, and begins to make secret inquiries into reducing diet, and to cling desperately to the strongest corset-lacing as her only hope. It would require one to be better educated than most of our girls are, to be willing to look like the Sistine Madonna or the Venus ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... We entered the Sistine Chapel, which we found bright and cheerful, and with a good light for the pictures. "The Last Judgment" divided our admiration with the paintings on the roof by Michael Angelo. I could only see and wonder. The mental confidence and boldness of the master, and his grandeur ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... In the Sistine Madonna, Raphael carried this form of composition to the highest perfection. So simple and apparently unstudied is its beauty, that we do not realize the masterliness of its art. We seem to be standing before an altar, or, better still, ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... high eminence; the master Raphael was already at work, as was also that remarkable genius, Leonardo da Vinci—the most universally gifted artist who ever appeared. Michael Angelo was at work in the Sistine Chapel, and his plans for St. Peter's were partly being carried out. It was in this time that Johannes Tinctor, the Netherlandish composer, founded a music school at Naples. The school itself was short-lived, but it was presently succeeded by four others of a different ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... salary, and stop on at Venice. A Duerer, not only secluded from Luther and his troubling denunciations, but living to see Titian and Giorgione's early masterpieces, perhaps forming friendships with them, and later visiting Rome, standing in the Sistine Chapel, seated in the Stanze between the School of Athens and the Disputa! I at least cannot console myself for these missed opportunities, as so many of his critics and biographers have done, by saying that doubtless had he stayed he would have been spoiled like those second-class German ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... a somewhat suspicious question of the old eyes staring up so fixedly at it. Who was I, and what was I doing there? Was I waiting, hanging idly about, to see the Armenian archbishop coming to carry my other self in his red coach to the Sistine Chapel, where we were to hear Pius IX. say mass? There was no harm in my hanging about, but the street was narrow and there was a chance of my being ground up by some passing cart against the wall there behind me if I was not careful. I could ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... look down into the gray ruins of my heart, you would not reprove me so harshly. My whole being seems in some cold eclipse, and my soul is like the Sistine Chapel in Passion-week, where all is shrouded in shadow, and no sounds are heard but Misereres ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... the 6th [March, 1853], the Benediction of the Golden Rose, was, according to annual usage, performed by the Pontiff previously to High Mass, in the Sistine Chapel, celebrated by a cardinal, at which he assists every Sunday during Lent. To the more ancient practice of blessing, on the fourth Sunday of 'Quaresima,' a pair of gold and silver keys, touched ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 • Various
... confirmed; and was restored by the Byzantine empire, which advanced eunuchs, like Eutropius and Narses, to the highest dignities of the realm. The cruel custom to the eternal disgrace of mediaeval Christianity was revived in Rome for providing the choirs in the Sistine Chapel and elsewhere with boys' voices. Isaiah mentions the custom (Ivi. 3-6). Mohammed, who notices in the Koran (xxiv. 31), "such men as attend women and have no need of women," i.e., "have no natural force," expressly forbade (iv. 118), "changing Allah's creatures," referring, say ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... . . There are not many public resources of amusement in this place,—if we wanted them,—which we don't. I miss the Dresden Gallery very much, and it makes me sad to think that I shall never look at the face of the Sistine Madonna again,—that picture beyond all pictures in the world, in which the artist certainly did get to heaven and painted a face which was never seen on earth—so pathetic, so gentle, so passionless, so prophetic. . . . There are a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... work as ministers without a fine equipment. We have an idea that we must have a committee back of us to be assured of success, that if we are without influence we have a small mission in the world, forgetting that Michelangelo wrought the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel with the ochres which he digged with his own hands in the garden of the Vatican; forgetting also that the greatest work in the world has been accomplished by men like Gideon, who delayed not for elaborate preparation, but just took firebrands and torches—indeed, anything they could ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... whatever, and yet they did not look a mob. And when that hymn was over—and here let me observe that, strange as it sounded, I have recalled that hymn to mind, and it has seemed to tingle in my ears on occasions when all that pomp and art could do to enhance religious solemnity was being done—in the Sistine Chapel, what time the papal band was in full play, and the choicest choristers of Italy poured forth their mellowest tones in presence of Batuschca and his cardinals—on the ice of the Neva, what time the long train of stately priests, with their ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... the sunshine and the genial climate of the South, and in general he was well enough to enjoy what Florence could give him of beautiful form and colour, and even to travel farther afield. One year he pushed as far as Naples, stopping on the way for a hurried glance at Rome. On this memorable day the Sistine chapel and its paintings were kept to the last; and Watts, high though his expectations were, was overwhelmed at what he saw. 'Michelangelo', he said, 'stands for Italy, as Shakespeare does for England.' So ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... the Italian school of painting and especially for the great masters of the Renaissance. Whole families of perfectly inartistic English and Americans might then he heard conscientiously admiring the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or Leonardo's Last Supper (Botticelli had not been invented then) in the choicest ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... not wonder that Hazel lingered with delight over these or over the groups by Raphael in the Sistine Chapel,—the quiet pendentives, where the waiting of the world for its salvation was typified in the dream-like, reclining forms upon the still, desert sand; or the wonderful scenes from the "Creation,"—the majestic "Let there be ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... furnished, but that the paucity of chairs and tables and bedsteads was such that their little party used almost to sit down, to lie down, in turn. On the other hand they had all George Eliot's writings, and two photographs of the Sistine Madonna. Ransom rapped with his stick on the lintel of the door, but no one came to receive him; so he made his way into the parlour, where he observed that his cousin Olive had as many German books as ever lying about. He dipped into this literature, momentarily, according to his wont, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... soon followed this movement in every detail, and then by slow degrees upon Italian soil began that evolution in artistic conception and artistic technique which was to culminate in the effulgent glory of Raphael's Sistine Madonna. It was the Emperor Justinian's conquest of Italy which "sowed the new art seed in a fertile field," to use Miss Hurl's expression; but inasmuch as artistic endeavor shows that same lack of originality which was ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... of his active career, showing how "the hand that rounded Peter's dome," and created so many other of the greatest works of art, toiled on with patient heroism, in spite of hinderances almost incredible. The painting of the Sistine Chapel, upon which his fame so largely rests, is here described in language that reveals the manhood no less clearly than the artistic genius ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... yet the clearest and best defined type of its own age. The decline of religious faith, the vagueness of the prevailing religious philosophy, and the approach of the Reformation, are all to be predicated from the "Last Judgment" in the Sistine Chapel; the impending fall of Art is to be read in the form of the "Moses" of San Pietro in Vincoli; the luxury and pomp of the Papal Court and Church are manifest in the architecture of St. Peter's, whose dome is swollen with earthly pride; the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel betrays ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... impulse and its sustenance from the very sources of life itself. In the wide range from the hut in the wilderness to a Gothic cathedral, from the rude scratches recorded on the cave walls of prehistoric man to the sublimities of the Sistine Chapel, there is no break in the continuity of effort and aspiration. Potentially every man is an artist. Between the artist, so-called, and the ordinary man there is no gulf fixed which cannot be passed. Such are the terms of our mechanical civilization ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... action and his passion for the human form lay the elements of his art most easily lending themselves to exaggeration. That the master did indeed permit himself to be carried beyond due limits in these matters is seen by comparing the grandeur of the Sistine ceiling with the mannerisms of the Last Judgment. The interval between was "the time of his best technical and spiritual creativeness," when he produced the statues of the Sacristy of ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... Vatican would have opened wide its doors. There, relieved of financial badgering, in the company of his equals, encouraged and uplifted, he might have performed such miracles in form and color that even the wonderful ceiling of the Sistine Chapel would ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... lifted them up, restored them to society. I have said avoid useless people, I mean selfish, lazy, purposeless, aimless people. Sir Humphrey Davy worked a miracle when he took the boy Farrady out of a stable loft and gave him a chance to cultivate his genius. The Sistine Chapel is Angelo's miracle. When the band on the deck of the Titanic, under the pale light of the morning stars played "Nearer My God To Thee," to give hope and strength to men and women struggling to ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... was to weaken this set formality by other objects wherein, though measure responded to measure, there was a slight change in kind or degree, the whole arrangement resembling that of an army in battle array; with its centre, flanks and skirmishers. The balance of equal measures—seen in his "Sistine Madonna," is conspicuous in most ecclesiastical pictures of that period, notably the "Last Supper of Leonardo" in which two groups of three persons each are posed on either side ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... is anticipated, the wafer being carried in procession, on the Thursday in Passion Week, from the Sistine to the Paoline Chapel, and brought back again on the Friday; thus missing the whole intention of the rite. Dr. Baggs, in his Ceremonies of Holy Week at Rome, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... Armenian Archbishop rolled up to the door in his red coach. The master of the house had always seemed to like us; now he appeared with profound respect suffusing, as it were, his whole being, and announced, "Signore, it is Monsignore come to take you to the Sistine Chapel in his carriage," and drew himself up in a line, as much like a series of serving-men as possible, to let us pass out. There was a private carriage for the ladies near that of Monsignore, for he had already advertised ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... to do with the "ceremonies." In fact I believe there have hardly been any—no midnight mass at the Sistine chapel, no silver trumpets at St. Peter's. Everything is remorselessly clipped and curtailed—the Vatican in deepest mourning. But I saw it in its superbest scarlet in '69.... I went yesterday with L. to the Colonna gardens—an adventure that would have ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... hymn on the Crucifixion, is one of the most familiar numbers in the Roman Missal. It is appointed to be sung at High Mass on the Friday in Passion Week, and also on the third Sunday in September. On Thursday in Holy Week it is also sung in the Sistine Chapel as an Offertorium. The poem was written by the monk Jacobus de Benedictis in the thirteenth century, and is regarded as one of the finest of mediaeval sacred lyrics. Grove says of it: "Several readings are extant; the one most frequently set to music being that ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... their art, has not the charm of oil. The eye must become habituated to this rude, lustreless coloring, before we can discern its beauties. Many people who never say so—for nothing is more rare than the courage to avow a feeling or an opinion—find the frescoes of the Vatican and the Sistine frightful; but the great names of Michel Angelo and Raphael impose silence upon them; they murmur vague formulas of enthusiasm, and go off to rhapsodize—this time with sincerity—over some Magdalen of Guido, or some Madonna of Carlo Dolce. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... repose, and the fatigue of enjoying is greater than the enjoyment itself. To hear again, years afterward, an old melody, every note of which we supposed we had forgotten, and yet to recognize it as an old acquaintance; or, after the lapse of many years, to stand once more before the Sistine Madonna at Dresden, and experience afresh all the emotions which the infinite look of the child aroused in us for years; or to smell a flower or taste a dish again which we have not thought of since childhood—all these produce such an intense charm that we do not know which we enjoy most, the ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... may have told you what Tennyson said of the Sistine Child, which he then knew only by Engraving. He first thought the Expression of his Face (as also the Attitude) almost too solemn, even for the Christ within. But some time after, when A. T. was married, and had a Son, he told me that Raffaelle was all right: that no Man's ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... she hardly knew what to say. The gleaming eyes of the lions, prowling among the ruined columns, fascinated her almost as much as the wild horses had done. She had less to say to the beautiful photograph of the Sistine Madonna, which came next; yet she looked at it with eyes of wistful affection. It was Margaret's favourite picture, and she loved it on that account as well as its own. Yet her taste was for "critters," as she freely acknowledged; and she glowed again as Bertha held up an engraving of ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... required them, so did the Pope; the one to guard his women, the other to say his prayers. These were of a peculiar kind, incapable of reproduction. Scarcely human beings, they were useful to voluptuousness and to religion. The seraglio and the Sistine Chapel utilized the same species of monsters; fierce in the former ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... is, and I shall be trying to look what I'm not. As for Garth Dalmain, he has eyes for all of us and a heart for none. His pretty speeches and admiring looks don't mean marriage, because he is a man with an ideal of womanhood and he can't see himself marrying below it. If the Sistine Madonna could step down off those clouds and hand the infant to the young woman on her left, he might marry HER; but even then he would be afraid he might see some one next day who did her hair more becomingly, or that ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... Raphael Madonna" is an Italian proverb, and so skilfully selected a type of beauty is there in his Virgins that they are neither too ethereal nor too sensuous. Divine tenderness, motherhood at its holiest, gazes calmly from the face of the Sistine Madonna, "whose eyes are deeper than the depths of waters stilled at even." The simple mind, unsophisticated by lore of the pre-Raphaelite school, will worship a Raphael when he will but revel in a Titian. Strangely touched ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... still see, but cannot define. Two or three times, Francesca rested her arm on his shoulder in unconscious familiarity. Looking at the head of the first-born of Moses, copied from Botticelli's fresco in the Sistine Chapel, she said—"It has a look of you when you are in one of your melancholy moods."—And when we came to the head of the Archangel Michael from Perugino's Madonna of Pavia, she remarked—-"It is a little like Giulia Moceto, is it not?" He did not answer, but only turned the ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... be lucky than rich. We had expected in Rome to do only what the Romans of our pocket-book do. But we fell in with some old acquaintances whose pleasure it is to give pleasure, and New Year's night was made memorable by a concert given by the choir of the Sistine Chapel, to which we were taken by the editor of the "Churchman" and later of the "Constructive Quarterly," an old friend of ours, Dr. Silas McBee. A glimpse into the British Embassy gave us an insight into the problem of Roman modern ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... departed from the Caucasian, he departed in the direction of the ape! Here was zoology mutely but eloquently telling us why there had blossomed no Confucius, no Moses, no Napoleon, upon that black stem; why no Iliad, no Parthenon, no Sistine Madonna, had ever risen from ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... the work of death, he sank upon his throne. There he remained, leaning his chin upon his two hands and staring straight before him like that terrible doomed creature who fascinates the eyes of every beholder standing in the Sistine Chapel and gazing at Michael Angelo's dreadful painting ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... him 122-214 days to count the eggs of a single turbot. After that, it would take a chartered accountant at least 122-214 days to check his figures. One can gather from this some idea of the enormous industry of men of science. For myself, I could more easily paint the Sistine Madonna or compose a Tenth Symphony than be content to loose myself into this universe of numbers. Pythagoras, I believe, discovered a sort of philosophy in numbers, but even he did ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... have the famous and wonderful pictures now foiling and dwarfing one another in our vulgar galleries, distributed over the Western world. I wish their enfranchisement. Each great picture should be given a room to itself, like the Sistine Madonna, not only a room but a temple like that of the Iverskaya at Moscow, not only a temple but a fair populous province. The great pictures should be objects of pilgrimages, and their temples places of prayer. In the galleries, as is obvious, the pictures ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... the pope cast ashes on the heads of the cardinals, it being Ash-Wednesday. On arriving, however, we found no more than the usual number of visitants and devotional people scattered through the broad interior of St. Peter's; and thence concluded that the ceremonies were to be performed in the Sistine Chapel. Accordingly, we went out of the cathedral, through the door in the left transept, and passed round the exterior, and through the vast courts of the Vatican, seeking for the chapel. We had blundered into the carriage-entrance of the palace; there is an entrance from some point near ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sent for the hotel-keeper and desired him to procure for herself and her two companions admission tickets to all the sacred ceremonies of the coming week. The worthy man fairly gasped at the coolness of this request. Tickets to the Sistine Chapel, to the Tenebrae, to the Benediction, and to the Glorification—and for three persons? Why, money couldn't buy them at that late hour, he declared. Admission tickets to paradise would be more ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... is, the central dogma in the faith of ecclesiastical Christendom? The legitimate result of this view, unflinchingly carried out, and applied to the precise point we now have in hand, is seen in that horrible portrayal of the Last Judgment wherewith Michael Angelo has covered the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in Rome. The great anatomical artist consistently depicts Christ as an almighty athlete, towering with vindictive wrath, flinging thunderbolts on the writhing and helpless wilderness of his victims. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the fulfillment of the prophecy embodied in the Mask. At the age of eighty, he produced the Descent from the Cross, which glorifies the Duomo in Florence. In between these productions, we find his David, his Moses, the Sistine Ceiling, with many others scarcely less notable. He rose to a higher and higher conception of art as he lived art more and more fully, and his execution kept pace with the expansion of his conception. He ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... elevated character to Raphael's faces—as in the "Sistine Madonna" and other paintings—is not their drawing, though that is always refined, but the expression of the eyes, which are truly the windows of the soul. It was the same in Hawthorne's face, and may be observed in all good portraits of him. An immutable calmness overspread his features, ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... best; like Bottom the Weaver, we prefer the "bottle of hay." What a mockery of right enjoyment our endless prying and sifting, our hunting of riddles in metaphors, innuendoes in tropes, ciphers in Shakspeare! Literature exhausted, we may turn to art, and resolve, say, the Sistine Madonna (I deprecate the Manes of the "Divine Painter") into some ingenious and recondite rebus. For such critical chopped-hay—sweeter to the modern taste than honey of Hybla—Charles Lamb had little relish. "I am, sir," he once boasted to an analytical, unimaginative ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb |
