ABSTRACT
IN Savonarola’s convent at Florence, the visitor traversing the bare corridors leading to Savonarola’s own cell, sees in almost every cell into which he looks, some presentment of the closing scenes of our Lord’s life. The agony in the garden, the Entombment, and the Resurrection, have all been depicted in fresco on one or other of the cell walls—their only decoration—either by Fra Angelico, himself no mean theologian, or by his disciples; but the scene most often repeated is the Crucifixion. With the Medieval painter, as with the apostles, the first thing to be thought of in the gospels was Christ upon the cross; the Saviour who went about doing good was to him a less potent figure than the Saviour who died on Calvary. Not only before the eyes of the individual monk at his devotions in his own cell, but facing the entrance to the convent where no casual visitor could fail to see it, is pictured this sublime figure. You feel at once that the painter-monk leaps directly to the centre of his theology. He is not interested in the properties of the scene; he is distracted by no such accessories, however awe-inspiring, as delighted Tintoretto or Rubens; you see but the one figure, bathed in light, thrown out across a dark background; calm and serene, the agony transcended, without a trace of it left behind, and the consummating words” it is finished” 181already uttered. Save for the delicate trickling of streams of blood, the idea of a death of pain is never suggested. The head bends forward, as if in blessing, not death; and if the closed eyes could open, they would rest on another figure, kneeling at the foot of the cross. And here the painter would have you see how symbolic is his treatment; for that figure is neither the Virgin nor the Magdalene nor S. John, but the founder of his own monastic order, S. Dominic. The saint looks upward in an ecstasy, his arms thrown around the cross, almost touching the Saviour’s feet. Between his hands flows the blood; but the painter has carefully refrained from allowing the fingers to touch the blood, or suggesting thereby that there could be anything efficacious in actual contact with the stream.
