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The Madonna of the Future

Henry James

96 ratings
The Madonna of the Future | Henry James

The Madonna of the Future

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painter had enjoyed doing it—for the little Dutch cabbages and kettles, for the taper fingers and breezy mantles of late-coming Madonnas, for the little blue-hilled, pastoral, sceptical Italian landscapes.  Then there are the days of fierce, fastidious longing—solemn church feasts of the intellect—when all vulgar effort and all petty success is a weariness, and everything but the best—the best of the best—disgusts.  In these hours we are relentless aristocrats of taste.  We will not take Michael Angelo for granted, we will not swallow Raphael whole!”

The gallery of the Uffizi is not only rich in its possessions, but peculiarly fortunate in that fine architectural accident, as one may call it, which unites it—with the breadth of river and city between them—to those princely chambers of the Pitti Palace.  The Louvre and the Vatican hardly give you such a sense of sustained inclosure as those long passages projected over street and stream to establish a sort of inviolate transition between the two palaces of art.  We passed along the gallery in which those precious drawings by eminent hands hang chaste and gray above the swirl and murmur of the yellow Arno, and reached the ducal saloons of the Pitti.  Ducal as they are, it must be confessed that they are imperfect as show-rooms, and that, with their deep-set windows and their massive mouldings, it is rather a broken light that reaches the pictured walls.  But here the masterpieces hang thick, and you seem to see them in a luminous atmosphere of their own.  And the great saloons, with their superb dim ceilings, their outer wall in splendid shadow, and the sombre opposite glow of mellow canvas and dusky gilding, make, themselves, almost as fine a picture as the Titians and Raphaels they imperfectly reveal.  We lingered briefly before many a Raphael and Titian; but I saw my friend was impatient, and I suffered him at last t

Andrew 04/20/2022
Pretty good, especially if you haven't read Balzac's "The Unknown Masterpiece" beforehand; James gives a fairly accurate portrait of a world of faced aristocrats and sexually-repressed people who are not entitled to vote for their representatives in government.
Yunong 01/21/2022
An interesting discussion on artistic ideals VS craftsmanship, the difference between a craftsman, an aesthete, and an artist, what constitutes genuine artistic appreciation, and the position of fine arts in a fast-paced, consumeristic society. It's been three years since I last read a work by Henry
Robert 03/28/2013
The Madonna of the Future is a longish short story whose resonance right now is audible, at the least. The story is an account of an American who has fallen in love with Florence and haunts it as he studies its art--notably Raphael's Madonna of the Chair in the Uffizi Gallery--and prepares himself t

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