Public-domain ebook
by Mrs. Jameson
English3,925 downloads on Project GutenbergDownload EPUB
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #69581.
The work is a scholarly yet conversational survey of Christian iconography, organized around the legends of angels, archangels, evangelists, apostles, doctors of the Church, and St Mary Magdalene as they appear in the fine arts. It opens with a lofty preface that frames the book as a “truth‑seeking spirit” and a “copious generosity” of illustration, promising readers a collection of sources ranging from fourth‑century sarcophagi to ninth‑century Byzantine miniatures. The author, Mrs. Jameson, explains that the text is meant to be read, not merely consulted, and that she has drawn on a wide array of hagiographic authorities, the Legenda Aurea, Flos Sanctorum, Butler’s Lives, compressing their narratives into concise, readable entries. The volume is divided into clearly labeled sections, beginning with an introductory essay on the origin and significance of the legends, followed by detailed chapters on angels, the archangels, the four evangelists, the twelve apostles, and the church doctors, each illustrated with woodcuts and steel‑etched plates.
Written in a genteel Victorian voice, the prose balances earnest scholarship with a personal, almost diary‑like enthusiasm for the subject. Its style is neither a dry catalogue nor a formal theological treatise; instead, it guides the reader “naturally from subject to subject” with a conversational tone that reflects the author’s own untrained yet passionate perspective. Readers who delight in the intersection of art history, theology, and myth, such as students of religious art, collectors of antique prints, or anyone fascinated by how saints and angels have been visualized across centuries, will find this volume both informative and enjoyable.
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‘We have in these volumes, penned in a truth-seeking spirit and illustrated with a copious generosity which at once elucidates and adorns each section of the subject, contributions to the literature of CHRISTIAN ART, for which every artist and every student of theology will confess debt of private gratitude. To thoughtful inquirers, richest mines are here opened for meditation. To minds prepared for deeper draughts to quench the thirst for knowledge, wells are dug and fountains are made to flow even in the desert tracks of time where pilgrim’s foot seldom attempts to tread. We think that Lady EASTLAKE has done special service in bringing into popular view recondite stores which have hitherto been sealed for public use. She has, by appeal to the early heads of Christ in the Catacombs, by reference to Christian sarcophagi of the fourth century, to ivories as old as the sixth century, and Greek MSS. and Byzantine miniatures of the ninth century, enabled the art-student to tract the history of types and antetypes, and to analyse the rudimentary germs which, from age to age accumulating strength and growing in comeliness, at length issued forth in perfected pictorial form. _It is to this, the infancy of art, that at the present moment peculiar interest attaches._’ BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE.
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