Winchester

 

WINCHESTER

 

 

"And the foam of his gasping

lay white on the turf"~~~Byron

 

 

“The touchstone of an art is its precision” ~~~Ezra Pound 

 

 

Psalms 63:3

“Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee.”

 

 

 

 

Protest and Communication

The Riemenschneider figures show very clearly the character of northern man at the end of the fifteenth century. First of all, a serious personal piety - a quality quite different from the bland conventional piety that one finds, say, in a Perugino. And then a serious approach to life itself. These men (although of course they were unswerving Catholics) were not to be fobbed off by forms and ceremonies - what at the time were, rather misleadingly, called 'works'. They believed that there was such a thing as truth, and they wanted to get at it. What they heard from Papal legates, who did a lot of travelling in Germany at this time, did not convince them that there was the same desire for truth in Rome, and they had a rough, raw-boned peasant tenacity of purpose. Many of these earnest men would have heard about the numerous councils that had tried throughout the fifteenth century to reform the organisation of the Church. I am reminded of them when I attend a meeting of UNO : the time spent on points of procedure, the speeches made for home consumption, the result a foregone conclusion. These grave northern men wanted something more substantial.”~~~Kenneth Clark: Civilisation. Ch 6.

 

 Chess: “Winchester”