Pre-Raphaelites praised saints,
but were themselves,
as artists must be,
mostly sinners
and the pearly gates of heaven
would've been closed
before their faces - etched deep
as signs of less than virtuous lives -
by armies of smiling,
beautiful saints
from God's own modelling agency.

If Caravaggio's Madonna
had bare, dirty feet
the saints of Pre-Raphaelites
could walk in muck and mud and crap
without staining theirs.

Beauty as an example,
but never as truth,
as truth is poison to legend.

Unwashed saints with bad, rotten
and missing teeth,
ugly and broken by hard
living as much as torturer's
rack and wheel,
they didn't exist when
an artist united beauty and religion.

Always they went back
to Arcadia's cold springs
as the Renaissance imagined it,
and not to the
muddy, spoiled, worm-infested waters
of reality.
               
Lambs on summer meadows,
smiling sepherds in the prime
of their life
they painted,
when the blackened slums
under skies of ash
spread misery and cholera.

The sepherds were absent
in their Puginite little palaces,
the lambs unwashed,
without hope
as much as without
knowledge of religion.

Neither they nor the bishop cared,
and lost in their legends
the Pre-Raphaelites painted
and writed, blind
to but to their imagination
and the curves of their models.

16.04.2012