Ghetto Comedies - pt. 9 Author:Israel Zangwill Volume: pt. 9 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1907 Original Publisher: The Macmillan Company Subjects: Jews Fiction / Religious Fiction / Christian / General Fiction / Jewish History / Jewish Social Science / Jewish Studies Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no... more » illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: UEUNB t' J THE MODEL OF SORROWS CHAPTER I HOW I FOUND THE MODEL I Cannot pretend that my ambition to paint the Man of Sorrows had any religious inspiration, though I fear my dear old dad at the Parsonage at first took it as a sign of awakening grace. And yet, as an artist, I have always been loath to draw a line between the spiritual and the beautiful; for I have ever held that the beautiful has in it the same infinite element as forms the essence of religion. But I cannot explain very intelligibly what I mean, for my brush is the only instrument through which I can speak. And if I am here paradoxically proposing to use my pen to explain what my brush failed to make clear, it is because the criticism with which my picture of the Man of Sorrows has been assailed drives me to this attempt at verbal elucidation. My picture, let us suppose, is half-articulate; perhaps my pen can manage to say the other half, especially as this other half mainly consists of things told me and things seen. And in the first place, let me explain that the conception of the picture which now hangs in its gilded frame is far from the conception with which I started -- was, in fact, the ultimate stage of an evolution -- for I began with nothing deeper in my mind than to image a realistic Christ, the Christ who sat in the synagogue of Jerusalem, or walked about the shores of Galilee. As a painter in love with the modern, it seemed...« less