I have recently finished reading this book. It is the story of Alessandra Cecchi, a child of the Renaissance, who after an eventful early life retires to a convent. As a Sister with a talent for drawing she undertakes to decorate the walls of the convent chapel with frescoes depicting the lives of the Virgin and John the Baptist. When finished she surveys what had become a major component of her life's work.
"My chapel is sadly mediochre. Should future conniosseurs of the new art (the Renaissance) come upon it they will glance at it for a moment and then pass on, noting it as an attempt by an inferior artist in a superior age. Yes, it has a feel for colour(that passion I never lost), and there are times when my father's cloth moves like water and the occasional face speaks of character as well as paint.
But the compositions are clumsy and many of the figures, for all of my care, remain staid and lacking in life. If kindness and honesty were to be held in mutual regard, one might say it was the work of an older artist without training who did her best and deserves to be remembered as much for her enthusiasm as for her achievement.
And if that sounds like a statement of failure from an old woman at the end of her life, then you must believe me when I tell you it is absolutely not.
Because if you were to put it with all the others; all the wedding panels and the birth trays and the marriage chests and the frescoes and the altar pieces and the panel paintings that were produced in those heady days when we brought man into contact with God in a way he had never been before... then you would see it for what it is: a single voice lost inside a great chorus of others.
And such is the sound that the chorus made together, that to have been part of it all was enough for me."
As a creator of various artistic motifs I can relate to this.
