JEAN FRANÇOIS MILLET
as I looked at Mantegna's martyrs. These masters are like mesmerists." And in another place, "When I saw Michael Angelo's drawing that represents a man in a swoon, the expression of the relaxed muscles, the planes and reliefs of that face sinking under bodily suffering, gave me quite a succession of sensations. I felt myself like him, tormented by pain. I pitied him. I suffered in the same body, with the same limbs." This approaches the sort of ecstatic intoxication experienced by a Saint Francis or a Saint Catherine of Siena at the vision of the crucified Christ whose wounds and stigmata became impressed upon their own bodies.
There is more in this than mere analogy. It was not for nothing that the patron saint of François Millet was Francis of Assisi. In his strange asceticism, in the attraction exercised on him by suffering, I recognise the powerful impression of Christian thought. Millet (and this is the fundamental reason of his moral originality amid his contemporaries), Millet was religious in his soul. We shall see, later on, how passionately Christian was the environment from which he sprang and how Jansenist, how
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