“Life so free, so strong, so glowing, it almost intoxicates”
The joy of re-reading Bernhard Berenson’s “The Italian Painters of the Renaissance.” Here, from the paintings of Giorgione his rapturous descriptions turn to the great Titian…
“… with better possession of himself, and with a larger and firmer hold on the world. At the same time, they show no diminution of spontaneous joy of life, and even an increased sense of its value and dignity. What an array of masterpieces might be brought to witness! In the “Assumption,” for example, the Virgin soars heavenward, not helpless in the arms of the angels, but borne up by the fullness of life within her, and by the feeling that the universe is naturally her own, and that nothing can check her course. The angels seem to be there only to sing the victory of the human being over his environment. They are embodied joys, acting on our nerves like the rapturous outburst of the orchestra at the end of “Parsifal.” Or look at the “Bacchanals” in Madrid, or the “Bacchus and Ariadne” in the National Gallery. How brim-full they are of exuberant joy! You see no sign of a struggle of inner and outer conditions, but life so free, so strong, so glowing, that it almost intoxicates. They are truly Dionysiac, Bacchanalian triumphs – the triumph of life over the ghosts that love the gloom and chill and hate the sun.”
