WOMAN IN ART
More and more intelligence is coming to woman, more and more is taking form. Guido essayed the ideal again in "Aurora" in the Barnerini Palace. The goddess of Dawn guides the steeds of Phoebus through and over the clouds that lie in the wake of departing night. The hours that accompany the coming day are partially draped maids wafted on clouds and suffused with broadening light.
His rainbow is another phase of the ideal.
The painting was a wonder in its early years, and has become an art classic; and who can say that the motif that inspired Guido Reni may not have inspired nineteenth century men in a new world. Spirited horses pranced the name and fame of William Morris Hunt into the foreground of art when he commissioned them with "The Flight of Night," in the state capitol at Albany, New York. Imperfectly prepared plaster was the means of losing that beautiful work to the state and the world.
In this twentieth century a New England artist has shown consummate skill and idealism in "The Triumph of Time," frescoed on the ceiling of the Children's Room of the Boston Library.
The artist, John Elliott, has aerialized rapid-plunging horses each with an attendant in form of a leading or restraining maiden. The action is vigorous, graceful, suggestive. The color scheme of delicate grays slightly flushed with violet and rose possesses strength and balance, the figures most pronounced, and every tone in draperies or flying coursers is faintly echoed in the cumulus clouds of the background and the foreground, that conceal yet half reveal the eternal abyss just ahead of oncoming centuries and millenniums. The powerful horses representing the centuries are in control of strong, intellectual, refined women. Was that a bit of prophecy?
A still more delicate idealism is in the graceful floating Iris, goddess of the rainbow, from the mind of the same artist who painted "Aurora." Seemingly she escapes from the bow bearing the proverbial pot of gold toward the rain-blessed earth. There is a togetherness of the delicate arms and limbs half concealed by wind-wisped fragments of vanishing cloud. It is a thought, caught, and escaped again—an ephemeral glimpse, a pictured idea. The motif a woman.
In spite of constant strife of parties and principles, political and religious, during the Renaissance, each of those wonderful centuries sent brighter beams up and athwart the dark and troubled world, and ever-increasing light was prophetic of a broadening day.
The outcry of man's religious nature for truth wherewith to feed his soul; the hunger of his mind for knowledge; the craving of his spirit for the beautiful,
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