Carlo Dolci

"Carlo Dolci" by George Hay is a biography of an Italian painter of the Baroque period, active mainly in Florence, known for highly finished religious pictures, often repeated in many versions. When only eleven years of age, Dolci attempted a whole figure of St John, and ahead of the infant Christ, which received some approbation. He afterward painted a portrait of his mother, displayed a new and delicate style that brought him into notice, and procured him extensive employment at Florence (from which city he hardly ever moved) and in other parts of Italy. Excerpt: «Carlo Dolci painted, or over-painted, the romance of life. It was his misfortune that he always saw it in the same way. He was like a musician who, having all the keys of the piano at his disposal, regards anything more than the simplest modulation from tonic to dominant and back again as an extravagance to which he must not surrender. Nowadays the horizon of art has widened very considerably; even in literature the obvious has passed out of fashion, but in the rather degenerate days when Carlo Dolci lived physical beauty was in a sense the keynote of all art work. No heroine could reach the last chapter of a romance in safety unless she chanced to be equipped with a measure of beauty that defied the assaults of time.»