Better than this was a painting of
Susannah and the elders, where the chaste Susannah is depicted clothed
to the throat like a Dutch burgomaster's wife, with a close cap and
long veil, while her perilous ablutions are typified by a small
wash-basin on the ground beside her. Another almost as grotesque was a
Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Breughel the Elder--a snow-scene in
the wide street of a red brick, high-gabled village--soldiers,
parents, children, all in the stiff, ungraceful Flemish dress of the
sixteenth century, the poor little children, in square trousers and
pinafores, clinging to their mothers' narrow skirts. Oddly enough, it
made the story more real to me than it had ever seemed before, quite
painfully and terribly so, indeed: dispoiled of its usual conventional
character, it became definite, and the very historical inaccuracy
which destroyed the traditional conception made it an historical fact.
We have only to go to Ghent and Bruges to see how the genius and
devout earnestness of the Van Eycks, Van der Heyden and Hemling raise
their pictures above trifling absurdities.
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