| (...) On the land of the castle of Pradine, near the village of Grambois, at the foot of the Luberon, not far from Avignon and these papal chambers where we have just stripped of admirable frescoes of whitewash that the Saint-Pancrace chapel, between its cypresses and its pines, watches over an old family cemetery, in a landscape of bitter splendor and melancholy, all nourished by a crude grace and as angelized by a continuous breath of spiritual charity. Around these Christian stones blues, as in Italy, a pagan air, humanizes a sky of legend. This is where Pierre Girieud, whose toilet of Venus is perhaps, with the panels of Laprade, the most admired canvas of the current Salon d'Automne, Alfred Lombard, the lyric painter of the Glory of Marseille and of this open window which was such a magnificent beginning, and Georges Dufrénoy, in three large frescoes, have fixed three monuments of the life and death of Christ, the Nativity and the Adoration of the Magi, the Sermon on the Mount, the Descent from the Cross (...) All is grace, light wealth, happy opulence, fervor, in the morning of the world where, at the foot of the very hill of Saint Pancrace, hardly transfigured in the dreamy background of his fresco, Pierre Girieud has kneeled the an old oriental civilization in front of the naive Child who receives the virgilian homage of the biblical shepherds, beautiful in their ebb of saffes like shepherds of Sicily, in front of the austere mother, with the smile of leaning thought and as if squeezed under the weight already of this the painful life prophesied by this dawn of triumph, and the magnificent figure of Saint Joseph, impregnated with noble nobility and popular anointing. Opposite, balancing the holy stanza of the Holy Family, the elegant archaism of the painter was pleased to group, in the wake of the Magi, happy courtesans, Nubian slaves, the beasts and stuffs of a pompous caravan , all the paraphernalia of a feast that goes, in the kneeling of kings, to change into a liturgical rite with the complicity of an adoring nature, a mystical landscape whose colorful peace marries the shades of the sky the most light, the most delicate that can be caressed, on the throats of the breezes, the tenderest clouds ... It is the first fresco, all kind, under his deep, clear, singing, gay thought, of a tight order, of hushed hues, of a limpid serenity, and which leads to the meditation of joyous mystery. It is of a noble charm and a tranquil perfection. (....) Reproduction of frescoes |